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in 2022 with funding from 
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Frank W. Gunsaulus, D. D. 


THE MINISTER AND THE 
SPIRITUAL LIFE 
Yale Lectures on lear ~ for 1911 
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OF RECENT ENGLISH POETRY 
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THE TRANSFIGURATION 
OF CHRIST 
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PATHS TO THE CITY OF GOD 


and other Sermons 


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The Transfiguration 
of Christ 


BY 
FRANK WAKELEY GUNSAULUS 


Our notions of what ts natural will be 
enlarged in proportion to our greater 
knowledge of the works of God and the 
dispensation of His providence. 

But er, Analogy. 





fC STRATA B arr: 


New YorK CuHICAGO TORONTO 


Fleming H. Revell Company 


LoNnDON AND EDINBURGH 


Copyright, 1886, 
By FRANK WAKELEY GUNSAULUS. 


All rights reserved. 


Copyright, 1907, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY. 


To my friends aforetime who were mem- 
bers of Johns Hopkins University, Balti- 
more, and to friends who latterly were 
members of the University of Chicago, all 
of whom studied with me, in these lectures, 
“ The Transfiguration of Christ,’ I dedi- 
cate this revised edition of a volume which 
owes much to their interest and thought. 

F. W. G. 
Central Church, Chicago. 
January ist, 1907. 





CONTENTS. 


I. The Nature and Method of Chris- 
Tats LWTPR a aN 3a, NaN Neh Nee ca UP 
II. The Time of the Transfiguration . 33 
III. The Place of the Transfiguration 63 
IV. The Transfigured Christ . . . 93 
V. The Appearance of Moses . . « 129 
VI. The Appearance of Elias . . . 159 
RUD JEStES OME Ve Veal) ‘ «2033 

VIII. The Transfiguration and the Res- 


BITELIOIY (Pes! fall's) \)))'9) || shila 


er 


LECTURE L 


» Nature and Method of Christian 
| Thinking. 





Ov yap cerodiopevors piBors éLaxodovOncavtes eyvwpicapev 
tpiv mv tov Kupiov nav "Incod Xpiorov divauiw Kat mapovoiav, 
GAA’ erdmrat yernBevtes THs Exetvov peyarcdTyTOs. AaPwy yap rapa 
cod matpos Tiny Kai doéav, wris evexPetons ard roracde wrod THs 
peyadorperous Soéns: Odrds eat 0 vids pov 0 ayamnros, cis Ov éyw 
evddxnoa. Kai ravtyv thy dwrynv nueis yKovoamev ef ovpavod évex- 
Ocigay, cv avT@ ovTEs ev TH Ope 75 ww.” 

EMISTOAH METPOY. BY. i. 16, 17, 18. 


«Tf the miracles, if revelation itself cannot stand upon the super- 
human character of Jesus, then let it fall. If that character does 
not contain all truth in itself, then let there be no truth. If there is 
anything worthy of belief not found in this, we may well consent 
to live and die without it. Before this sovereign light, streaming 
out from God, the deep questions and dark surmisings and doubts 
unresolved, which make the night so gloomy and terrible about 
us, hurry away to their native abyss. God, who commanded the 
light to shine in darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. 
This it is that has conquered the assaults of doubt and false learn- 
ing in all past ages, and will in all ages to come. No argument 
against the sun will drive it from the sky. No mole-eyed scep- 
ticism, dazzled by its brightness, can turn away the shining it re- 
fuses to look upon. And they who long after God will be ever 
turning their eyes thitherward, and either with reason or without 
reason, or, if need be, against manifold impediments of reason, will 
see and believe.” — Horace BusHNELL. 


NCIC NCIC NEE) 


THE TRANSFIGURATION 
OF CHRIST. 





LECTURE I. 


The Nature and Method of Christian 
Thinking. 


“And when He was come into the house, the blind men came 
unto Him, and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to 
do this? They say unto Him, Yea, Lorp.” — Mattuew ix. 28. 


“ Nature is the parable of grace. The worlds of mind and mate 
ter interpenetrate each other. In Him we live, and move, and 
have our being. In all the process of grace, He is first, not we, 
We find Him, because He first finds us. We confirm our faith by 
means of reason, indeed, but that faith is itself the fruit of Divine 
contact with the soul. We must learn that it is not by arguments 
without, but by the breath of God within, that we get our first im- 
pressions of the Divine existence.’* Francis L. Patton, Zhe 
Genesis of the Idea of God. 


HAVE chosen to study with 
you this event in the life of the 





man and the men of our Lord’s 
immediate ministry, in order that, before 
entering into the light of Christ’s trans- 
figuration, we may gain for ourselves the 


4 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


true point of view of all Christian thinking, 
and become sympathetic with the condi- 
tions and methods of Christian discovery. 
Here Jesus made clear the relation between 
an acceptance of Hzmse/f in the spirit of a 
man and the new vision which the powers 
of thought shall thereby obtain, in which 
any event of the mutual life of Christ anda 
man may be rightly understood. Per- 
haps never more deliberately did He stop 
to show that He Himself in the human 
spirit must be the source of any or all intel- 
lectual conditions whereby His dealings 
with it may be comprehended. 

These blind men had been following Him 
with their want, crying: “ Zhou Son of 
David, have mercy upon us.”* It is evident 
from their cry that some of the conditions 
of blessing were already theirs. Always 
the thoughts with which the mind comes 
to a fact or truth, limit, or enlarge, and, in- 
deed, otherwise modify the real possession 


1 Verse 27. 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 5 


we have when any fact or truth is appre- 
hended through thinking. So their ideas, 
coming from tradition or arising out of 
their conscious need, were at once the ave- 
nues along which their blessing must come 
and the gates which should admit it fully 
by their breadth or contract it by their nar- 
rowness. They had conceived of Him as 
“ the Son of David.” That conception was 
an open door into their spirits; and yet, 
when compared with a complete conception 
of Jesus, we see that it was too narrow to 
let the whole and even the essential Christ 
into their conscious life. It prepared them 
by its opening expectancy, but its slight 
breadth imposed a mental limitation. They 
asked only for “ mercy ”—“ Have mercy 
upon us.” And this significant cry, arising 
from conscious need, was modified in its 
very birth by their apprehension of Christ ; 
yet it was the only opening through which 
His merciful gift might pass. Thus did the 
measure of their faith determine at once the 


6 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


measure of the blessing He might bestow. 
It could be no more, for their conscious life 
had not opened unto more; it could be no 
less, because of the abundant mercifulness 
to which they had appealed. So when the 
biessing was given, He indicated not any 
arbitrary limit which He put upon it, but 
rather the necessary limit which their spir- 
itual hospitality, as seen in their faith, made 
for it. “ According to your faith,’ He said, 
“ be it unto you.” 

It is pleasant to think that God's bless- 
ings are not thus conditioned and modified 
by our faith; that the greatness of His gift 
does somehow get in, in spite of our little- 
ness; and, working in us unconsciously, 
that it does at last reveal itself to our 
conscious life. And the truth in such a 
thought is this, namely, that the very least 
of an apprehended blessing leads us to the 
larger stores of grace; and so swift is the 
movement of the newly touched mind, 


1 Verse 29. 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 7 


from the new want which the fresh blessing 
discloses, to a renewed appeal, that we do 
not recognize how we are constantly ap- 
proaching God, again and again, by new 
stages of developed faith which are ours 
after each answer He gives. 

The comparative narrowness of the faith 
of these blind men has another evidence. 
After they had seen Him, through their 
newly opened eyes, and He had said: 
“ See that no man know it,’ “ they spread 
abroad His fame in all that country.” As 
in many similar cases, He would have made 
such an addition to their interior life, 
through His touch upon their exterior life, 
that the visible achievement would have 
been lost in their newly developed and in- 
visible manhood, That, however, would 
have been a greater blessing than they 
could have received through a spiritual 
vision limited by their conceiving of Christ 
simply as the “ Sox of David.” No; they 

1 Verse 30, 


& The Transfiguration of Christ. 


could not admit that greater illumination. 
The idea which they had of Jesus Christ 
had defined itself when they cried, “ Son of 
David,’ and the conception which they had 
of their own need discovered itself in the 
prayer: “ Have mercy.” This was their 
mental attitude. It was too narrow a gate- 
way for the complete gift which the Christ 
brought with Him, yet it was sufficiently 
broad to admit enough of His influence to 
create in them a new mental condition, 
which would make the incoming of more 
inevitable. The view of Him, expressed in 
that cry, had filled them with such a vision 
of Him and of His visible kingdom, with its 
immediate and manifest triumph, that they 
discerned the stately movings of the Mes- 
siah in His growing fame. 

Profoundly did Christ then recognize the 
fact, of which they were all too unconscious, 
that there must be in the totality of each 
character which we call the spirit of the 
man, a deeper acceptance of Himself. 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 9 


This presence of Himself in their spiritual 
life must be the prerequisite to any intelli- 
gent taking in of anything He might do for 
them. “ Believe ye that I am able to do 
this?” He said. In the narrow opening 
of mind which was disclosed by their cry, 
He, as something more than the “ Sox of 
David,” saw an opportunity of entrance. 
He proposed to widen the gate as He en- 
tered, by asking for a more hospitable faith. 
Then, as though He would fasten that gate 
of apprehension open against the wall of 
their consciousness, He held their thought 
and made them look from out the very 
depths of their spirits, and say: “ Yea, 
Lord.” When they accepted Him as 
“ Lord,’ their mental apprehension had 
widened from the narrowness of the cry, 
“ Thou, Son of David.’ Then it was that 
He entered as sight to their blindness. So, 
He was accepted personally, before He 
came into them as miracle and blessing. 
He Himself had touched the centres of 


10 ~=The Transfiguration of Christ. 


their spiritual life, and He thus widened 
from within, through the mind without, a 
path for the miracle. All that this blessing 
and wonder were to their intellectual life 
was made possible and even natural by His 
presence in their spiritual life. Accepting 
Him at the very centres of their being, they 
could accept the miraculous blessing in the 
outlying realm of thought. Limited was 
their acceptance ; limited was the blessing. 
The hands which were held out were filled 
with all they could hold. But back of the 
holding out of any hands which might carry 
anything away, was the Christ of an inte- 
rior experience, who inspired their larger 
faith. A greater miracle within—the ac- 
cepted Christ—had prepared them for the 
lesser one without. After His entrance into 
them, the supernatural was natural to their 
minds, to the extent of their conscious re- 
ception of the natural lordship of Jesus 
Christ over their spirits. 

Here are disclosed the nature and method. 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 11 


of Christian thinking. They flow out of 
the nature of the Christian life—the hiding 
of the soul, z. ¢., the life with Christ in God! 
—the mastery by the Christ of the human 
spirit, inclusive, as the spirit is, of the con- 
cerns and destiny of intellect, sensibilities 
and will. 

Christianity means a revelation of the Di- 
vine in the human—first in Jesus Christ ; 
then in other men. The religions before 
Christ were efforts from earth towards 
heaven ; the religion of Christ is the effort of 
heaven towards the earth. In the highest 
pre-Christian religion, the sacrifice was of- 
fered by men for the reconciliation of God ; 
in Christianity, the sacrifice is made by God 
for the reconciliation of man. In the one, it 
was to change the feelings of heaven that the 
altars flamed with fire and were red with 
blood: in the other, it was to transform the 
feelings of earth that the altar-steps of Cal- 
vary bore the crucifix. A related difference 


1 Colossians iii. 3. 


12 +The Transfiguration of Christ. 


is seen, at that moment when the empire of 
the old passed into the republic of the new 
humanity. Froude says, concerning Julius 
Cesar:! “Strange and startling resem- 
blance between the fate of the founder of 
the kingdom of this world and of the foun- 
der of the kingdom not of this world, for 
which the first was a preparation, Each 
was denounced for making himself a king. 
Each was maligned as the friend of publi- 
cans and sinners: each was betrayed by 
those whom he had loved and cared for: 
each was put to death: and Czsar also was 
‘believed to have risen again and ascended 
into heaven and become a divine being.” 
This, however, does not do justice to the 
first proposition of the Christian system. 
To our eyes, the position of Czsar in the 
mind of Rome was the last achievement of 
the decaying spirit. It was the exalting of 
a man from earth, by colossal effort, into 
the stature of a god. To our eyes, also, 
1 Cesar, a Sketch, closing words. 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 13 


the place of Jesus in the consciousness of 
humanity was the first fact vouchsafed to 
note the inspiration of the receptive spirit. 
It was the approach of the living God, to 
effortless and waiting souls, in the form and 
substance of a man. As the evening of 
Paganism left the race with the apotheosis 
of a Cesar, the morning of Christianity 
broke with the incarnation of God in the 
Christ. The evening darkened into mid- 
night, with man crying up to God: that 
midnight retreated before the morning, 
with God speaking to and in humanity. 

It is indisputable, in the presence of this 
vital difference, that much of our thinking 
on Christian topics inside the church is 
pagan. We begin on earth to build our 
steps of apprehension to the realm of God. 
We make our intellectual fundamental to 
our spiritual life, and expect great dis- 
coveries unto the spirit from a keen and 
alert reason. We have not taken the 
living Christ as the primal and initiative 


14. The Transfiguration of Christ. 


fact in personal as well as historic Chris- 
tianity ; but, with characteristic rationalism, 
we have begun with an incidental miracle 
to explain the essential miracle—the babe 
in the manger, or the victim on the cross. 
Our religious thinking has oftentimes been 
even less prophetic than the Psalmist’s. We 
have tried to see God in the light of nature, 
while he said: “Jz Thy light shall we see 
light.” ’ We have sought to explain Christ 
in the light of events, related or isolated, 
while He was saying to our twilight: « 7 
am the light of the world.” Our thinking 
has thus, and too often, reversed the divine 
order; and, without a word which would 
prepare the mind for its new light, we have 
attempted to produce illumination upon its 
blindness, asking its bewildered vision then 
to recognize, in it all, a supernatural Christ. 

Jesus Christ does not manifest His essen- 
tial Godhead more plainly than in the spirit- 
ual faith He demands as fundamental to any 


1 Psalm xxxvi. 9. 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 15 


intellectual apprehension of Him. In a 
sense, perhaps not wholly understood by 
himself, did one of the earlier theologians 
declare: “ God is the way to Himself.” The 
Christ maintains, in His influence on the 
soul of man, this divine characteristic. In 
it all, He does not destroy the native logic 
of human nature. His entrance into the 
human spirit restores it. Faith is a spirit- 
ual apprehension which comes by a united 
act of the intellect, the feelings and the will. 
In the act of faith, man is simply his in- 
tegral self. The truth which faith sees has 
the evidence of the other domains of the 
spirit of man, in its appeal to any one. 
Through its wide hospitality, God and His 
Christ enter the whole nature. The in- 
tellect has a new premise, from the entire 
spirit’s experience. It can see God through 
thought, because into all the texture of 
thinking God has entered, as a fact lying 
back in the consciousness of the whole 
spiritual nature. It can now see light, 


16 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


because light is in its eye; and even the 
abstract truth, which escaped it so long, 
is apprehended by a sight divine. 

Jesus does not offer to the intellect the 
supernatural in the abstract. He comes as 
its incarnation, offering Himself to the 
spirit, whose eye is faith, that He may 
assume His natural lordship over a man’s 
entire conscious life. No act of intellect 
can admit Him. He asks to be taken by 
faith, which involves the activity of the 
whole soul. He influences and acts from 
the centre, where intellect, feeling, and will 
are articulated and concurrent in the one 
supreme act of faith. Once at the centre 
of man’s conscious life, He will be borne 
outward to the entire circumference of its 
intellectual, emotional, and volitional ac- 
tivity, and be everywhere its Lord. Con- 
crete in Him, the supernatural is taken into 
the new combinations of man’s conscious 
life, the moment he accepts in the faith of 
his undivided spirit the lordship of Jesus 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 17 


Christ. Then begins his Christian experi- 
ence, which the intellect shares with the 
feelings and the will. Until then, there has 
been a persistent fragmentariness of his na- 
ture in being and action. In this initial act 
of accepting Christ, man is consciously one. 
He begins to think, as ason of God. The 
new logic of his new life pervades the 
operations of his mind. In this experience, 
so interfused are the realms of spiritual life, 
that he may “ love God with all his mind.” ' 
Having an interior experience with the 
supernatural, he has an eye for it, as he 
never had before. In the growing con- 
sciousness which is his, of the supernatural- 
ness of Jesus Christ, he feels his own. It is 
the moment when his true life begins to 
realize itself. In the central depth of 
Christ’s supernaturalness, his own is quick- 
ened into life and becomes conscious. “ J 
am the vine,” said his lord, “ ye are the 
branches.”* In the life of Christ, ours must 


1 Matthew xxii. 37. * John xv. 5. 


18 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


begin; and with its vitality ours must thrill, 
driving, as it grows, more deeply into His, 
and repeating the rhythm of the life divine, 
as its juices circulate in our veins. Being 
thus vitally attached to the life of Christ, 
we repeat His life intellectual, emotional, 
volitional ; and hence, so far as the privilege 
and duty of Christian living go, they are 
one; and, in thought, as well as action, we 
have their union as we obey the injunction: 
“Let this mind be in you which was in 
Christ Jesus.” > 

These words of Paul are evidence of his 
intelligent grasp of the philosophy of 
Christian faith and life. Here, he had in 
mind an ethical problem. Man’s struggle 
with visible expediency was in his thought. 
“ The mind of Christ” had the significance 
of a condition in which Christ “made Him- 
self of no reputation, and took upon Himself 


1 Philippians ii. 5, 6,7. See Bishop Brooks’s sermon 
on this text. 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 19 


the form of a servant, and was made in the 
likeness of men,’ and “ became obedient unto 
death.” Just as then that problem of ethics 
was solved, so now must our problems of 
thought gain their solution. This “ ménd 
of Christ” is to be the salvation of the 
human intellect. No more truly does the 
acceptance of Christ in the spirit bring with 
it the consciousness of one’s new attitude 
to the universe as a we// than the con- 
sciousness also of a new attitude unto it as 
an zuztellect. The consciousness of one’s 
own supernaturalness through the reve- 
lation of Christ, in the face of that arrogant 
and tyrannous naturalism which sin has 
developed, asserts itself in a new method of 
self-determining life, after the zz2/Z of 
Christ: that same consciousness asserts 
itself in a new view of the universe, in 
which there lies a unique mental method 
that makes the supernatural natural, at 
least to the process and realization of the 
new intellectual life. The intellect is « dorm 


20 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


again,’ and “ born of the spirit.”* In its 
old life, it had touched this finite thing and 
that, with no reference to the infinite. Now 
it sees through and by means of the infinite, 
and, in its atmosphere, looks upon the finite. 
What has happened to the man? The 
fact is that, intellectually, he is converted. 
He is “ born from above” and “ of God.” 
It is not a wondrous development of the 
old life, however well it has succeeded in 
adding together many finite things that 
it might reach the infinite ; but it is a totally 
new life, wherein it begins with the infinite 
as the fact of which it is the most sure. It 
is the soul’s veal life It is a life in God, 
for He begins, in creation and providence, 
with the infinite—Himself. It discloses it- 
self with the same experience, in the affec- 
tions and will. Coming into the spirit by 


1 John iii. 4. 2 John ili. 5. 
8x John iii. 9. 
4 Martineau, “ Hours of Thought with Sacred Things.’ 
Sermon on “ The Finite and Infinite in Human Nature.” 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 21 


faith, instead of coming to one of its realms, 
the intellect, by reason, Jesus Christ at 
once enters the whole region of the in- 
terior life, and acts at that central point 
where the realms of the spirit are one 
through the act of faith. It is not the old 
life of the will, continually adding to its 
finite efforts that it may reach the infinite. 
Its true life begins in the infinite, not by 
achieving it, but by yielding unto it, that it 
may be strong. And so with the affec- 
_ tions. It is not a life developed into com- 
pleteness out of the incompleteness of the 
old. The new life begins where the old 
sought to end—with the infinite Love. 
Thus Jesus addresses the paganism of our 
time, which tries to build its ladder to the 
skies, hoping that it will some day and 
somehow so understand nature as to find its 
Reason for the human intellect, or that 
some time it may obtain a satisfying cosmic 
emotion for the affections, or that by and 
by it will control the restless powers of the 


22 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


universe by its will. He says, as of old, 
“ Ye must be born again.” 

The true method of Christian thinking 
then, flows out of the nature of the “ xew 
birth,’ which is the characteristic event in 
the related life of Christ and the human 
spirit. As did the blind men, so must the 
spiritual nature get from the supernatural 
Christ, whom it truly calls “« Lord,” a quite 
natural mental preparation for and an out- 
look upon the supernatural, a preparation 
of that sort which not only saves it from the 
confusion of ignorance, but gives it the 
peace of intelligent power. There is no 
other peace for so sublime a being as man. 
We may see the point of view which the 
mind obtains, as we note one character- 
istic trait of Christ and of His truest 
disciples. That trait is their consciousness 
of infinity. The acceptance of the personal 
Christ gives the mind this atmosphere. 
Just as with the supernatural Christ, in the 
spirit’s experience, the mind has a sense of 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 23 


the supernatural, so with the infinite Christ, 
at the centre of character, there takes posses- 
sion of the entire being a consciousness of 
infinity as natural as it is pervasive. “ In- 
finity” is abstract to aridity without Him: 
it is concrete to impressive reality in Jesus 
Christ. With this consciousness, allied 
with and oftentimes not to be distinguished 
from the sense of the supernatural thus 
gained in Christ, a believer comes to what 
are termed “ miracles ”; and, looking upon 
them from a divine point of view, they are 
seen to come naturally into the order of the 
universe. A world without miracles be- 
comes far less credible than a world with 
them. It is only necessary to get the 
point of view and the mental method 
furnished to these blind men in Christ’s 
accepted lordship over their souls, and then 
miracles may appear as natural in the 
order of our thought as they were in the 
order of their occurrence. Jean Paul says: 
“What are miracles on earth are nature 


24 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


in heaven.” If, then, one accepts his 
“heavenly place” of spiritual experience 
and of consequent mental life “zz Christ 
Jesus” as his point of view, he must look 
upon the Transfiguration of Christ as the 
natural manifestation of His infinite power 
and glory. 

Whenever we approach such an event, we 
see how necessary even yet, it is for Him to 
say to His disciples : “ Marvel not at this.” 
He continually aimed at decreasing their 
unintelligent astonishment at these normal 
manifestations of His life, saying, “ Marvel 
not at this,” or by asking silence concerning 
it. He was seeking to get them to realize 
the fact that, having accepted Him, there 
was nothing for them to wonder at, and 
that, though without Him, they must bea 
constant source of intellectual confusion ; 
with Him in their spiritual life, they were 
matters of course. He was showing them 
the naturalness of miracles eventuating, as 


1 Ephesians i. 3, 20; ii. 6. 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 25 


they did, out of that greatest of miracles, 
Himself. Lord of their whole life, He was 
Lord of their thought and in it; so that 
from this accepted lordship they ought to 
expect, as they had indeed accepted, a lord- 
ship over nature which should make won- 
ders cease. With their sense of the super- 
natural feeding upon Him,—with the infi- 
nite, which was He, in the mind’s eye, they 
should have no thoughtless surprise at the 
appearance of the supernatural anywhere.? 

We need have no fear, as Jesus Himself 
had none, that in this view the evidential 
value of the miracles, to which the Trans- 
figuration is related, shall be lost. It is not 
necessary to repeat considerations which 
have been stated with great force in our 
day and which show that their evidential 
value, though urged in a way quite differ- 
ent from that of former times, has, never- 


1Steinmeyer, 7ie Miracles of our Lord, Introduc. 
tion. Venn, On some of the Characteristics of Belie/, 
Pp. 187. 


26 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


theless, a mighty and even irresistible 
effect—an effect withal precisely such as 
Jesus Himself desired that it should have 
over the men of His ownage. “ Blessed” 
still are they “ who, not having seen, have 
nevertheless believed.”' We addresses Him- 
self to the whole spirit through faith, not to 
the intellect alone through its processes of 
logic. Once in the soul, He comes to the 
intellect with a native lordship. He, as the 
supernatural itself within the atmosphere of 
man’s life, makes the supernatural credible. 
Hume’s phrase, “ the contrariety of miracles 
to experience,” falls to the ground. The 
intellect has necessarily participated in the 
experience of the whole spiritual nature, and 
in that experience, one’s thinking has had 
to do with the greatest of miracles—the 
miracle of the Christ. After Jesus Christ 
has sent the thrill of His supernatural life 
from the centre to the circumference of a 
man’s spirit, any words about miracles being 
1 John xx, 29; 2 Corinthians v. 7. 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 27 


“interruptions of the course of nature” 
seem to clearly indicate an inadequate con- 
ception of nature and positive ignorance of 
that dominant personal nature within. In- 
deed, the consciousness of infinity, which 
the whole spiritual nature gets in Christ, so 
prepares the intellect for the natural out- 
working of His essential life, that, when 
miracles come from His hand, the mind 
feels that it has not failed to understand 
Him, and has the evidence which comes of 
seeing what it expected to see. 

« Peace settles where the intellect is meek ; 


The faith heaven strengthens when He moulds the 
Creed.” ? 


1« Miracles and the proof of miracles from testimony 
cannot be spared. When the peculiarities which dis- 
tinguish Christianity from all other religions have im- 
pressed our minds, when the character of Christ in its 
unique and supernal quality has risen before us in its 
full attractive power, and when, from these influences, 
we are almost persuaded, at least not a little inclined, to 
believe in the gospel as a revelation of God, we crave 
~ some attestation of an objective character; we naturally 
expect that if all this be on a plane above nature, there 
will be some explicit sign and attestation of the fact.— 
Prof. George P. Fisher. ? Wordsworth. 


28 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


It is not meant, in this lecture, to assume 
that the entire preparation of the human 
spirit for Christian discovery has to do with 
the intellect alone, and that such an event 
as the Transfiguration of Christ has its 
entire lesson to impart to the faculties of 
thought. Christian thinking itself is spir- 
itual. Everything Christian restores and 
preserves the integrity of the spiritual being 
of man. This consciousness of infinity 
which Christ brings with Himself into the 
spirit is the common medium through 
which intellect, affections, and will have ex- 
perience by and in fazth. Christ comes to 
the whole nature in each of His manifesta- 
tions of essential life. Faith is, psycholog- 
ically, the act of the entire interior nature. 
It alone has the concurrent power of intel- 
lect, sensibilities and will. And when in 
their integrity, as a unit, they take the 
Christ, by the laws of the spiritual life, 
whatever He is or has will touch whatever 
the man is or has. This consciousness of 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 29 


infinity will be dominant everywhere. The 
will loses its finiteness ; and it so girds itself 
with His might that a St. Paul says, “ J can 
do all things through Christ which strength- 
eneth me.”* It has not only obtained a 
consciousness of infinity in the abstract, but 
it has what was the source of its clear meta- 
physic,—a reality which in the realest way 
has developed its real self. The feelings 
lose their incapacity ; the affections lose 
their finiteness. They so clothe themselves 
with His nature that the Infinite reveals 
Himself as Love, and the love of Love be- 
comes the passion of the heart. They, 
also, have not only obtained a conscious- 
ness of infinity, but they have, what was the 
ground of this, a reality so real to them that 
they stir with forces which are boundless. 
The intellect, too, loses its finiteness. It so 
adopts Himself as its point of view, and the 
medium through which He looks as its own, 
that it becomes a reality to itself for the 
' Philippians iv. 13. 


30 «The Transfiguration of Christ. 


first time. It is contemporary with the 
powers which moved in the chaos of the 
past and work yonder in the rich future. 
It is at home with the counsels of the In- 
finite One. They are its readiest postu- 
lates. In the light of the infinite, it sees 
light. The “new heavens” of thought 
have come, and, underneath, the “new 
earth” of thought.? So far as the inter- 
pretation of any new event on earth is con- 
cerned, it must be gained from this point of 
view. Things are to be understood “ from 
above.” Like the “new Jerusalem” of 
man’s civilization, the “ new Jerusalem” of 
his philosophy of life “ cometh down from 
God, out of heaven.” * 

The study upon which we now enter 
proceeds upon the assumption, then, that 
Christ had been accepted by Peter, James, 
and John, and that in order to understand 


4 Psalm xxxvi. 9. 3 Revelation xxi, i. 


8 Revelation xxi, 2, 


The Nature of Christian Thinking. 31 


the event, in even the small measure of 
which our present life makes us capable, 
there must be in us the preparation of mind 
which the presence of Christ in us brings. 
Beginning with this sense of the super- 
natural and consciousness of infinity, the 
glistening garment and the shining face are 
not as unnatural and incongruous as, with- 
out these, is the merest chemical change in 
the test tube to the student abreast with his 
science.! The mind finds a universe on its 
hands, when it takes up an atom. Says 
Tyndall: “ The study of any part of nature 
completely would involve the study of the 
whole.”? It is becoming painfully evident 
to a non-Christian philosophy that the finite 
cannot explain the infinite. Hands are 
reaching out for the infinities. Indeed, 
men are surer of the infinite than of the 
finite. The dust trembles with forces not 


' Modern Realism, p. 46; The Unseen Universe, p. 986 
8 The Forms of Water, p. 6. 


32 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


its own.! It is beyond its finite horizon 
that the movement began with which mat- 
ter is stirred. The “atom” is quite as 
much a fact of metaphysics as of physics. 
In the twilight of our time, a mind which 
has felt the intellectual lordship of Christ 
may stand unbewildered in the glory of a 
Transfiguration, because it sees a philosophy 
without the infinite dashed into pieces even 
by the soft-falling dew. 

As a step in the unfolding of the infinite, 
we shall look at the Transfiguration of 
Christ. Here, as elsewhere, in Him and 
His life the finite and infinite meet; the 
natural and the supernatural coalesce. Be 
it ours to see life’s problem where its con- 
flicting forces are in luminous peace, that 
we may gain the experience which fuses 
them into that transfigured calm. 

1 Pieton, Mystery of Matter, First Essay ; Clark-Max- 
well, Biography, p. 169; The Supernatural in Nature, 
p- 65; Pierce, /acality in Science, c. 3; Kekulé, Lehr 


buch der organischen Chemie, Lange, Geschichte des- 
Materialismus, ii. 190. 


LECTURE II. 
The Time of the Transfiguration. 


“ Nihil sine etate est.’” — TERTULLIAN. 


pAb eat 


LUN i 


AY NG 


‘ait Bae) 





BB es eS 


LECTURE II. 


The Time of the Transfiguration. 


“* And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings.” 
— Luxgix. 28. 


aN the unity of a great nature or 





<a4/ movement lies a logic which makes 
the succession of events in its ca- 
reer a continuous development. Behind 
and within the latest is the significance of 
the earliest fact. Psychology now sees 
the whole man, in the most seemingly 
partial exercise of the soul. The person- 
alty so reigns supreme and infuses itself 
through the division lines which any me- 
chanical geography may have made of the 
realm of our interior life that every power 
is seen to be concerned in and to condi- 
tion the action of every other. Theology, 
in the glow of a renascent life, finds that 


36 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


God has not at one time acted as the su- 
preme justice, and at another as the infi- 
nite mercy, but that at all times and every- 
where He has been manifesting Himself. 
It is marvelous to thoughtful minds how 
we could have escaped the fact, that, when 
we say “God is,” we have put aside all 
conceptions of an interrupted providence 
and a broken human history. It goes 
without saying that along with these have 
gone all dogmas which make the nature of 


, 


God a collection of opposing attributes, or 
a battle-ground of inharmonious powers. 
The infinite is one. God is the absolute 
integer. In the light of this fact, the rev- 
elation of God in Holy Scripture, in hu- 
man history, and in His self-manifestation 
in Jesus Christ, becomes a unit; and as 
His revelation in the life of man accounts 
for the “solidarity” of the race, so the 
presence of Himself in Jesus of Nazareth 
gives Christ’s career a unity all divine, — 
a unity which He declared as such when 
He said : “Vy Father worketh hitherto, and 


Time of the Transfiguration. 37 


TI work.” Inno clearer words could Paul 
have declared this phase of the dezty of 
Christ than by saying, “ Fesus Chrost, the 
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” * 

All great poetry, however surely it has 
missed its inspirer, has noted what a Chris- 
tian theist must term the unity of God in 
His revelation in history, as it has de- 
tected the life of every meaning of the 
past in the present. To its vision, the fu- 
ture is radiant only by a continuity of life 
which relates its eras in an unbroken eter- 
nity. Says George Eliot: — 

“Presentment of better things on earth 
Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls 
To admiration, self-renouncing love, 
Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one; 
Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night 
We hear the roll and dash of waves that break 
Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide, 
Which rises to the level of the cliff 


Because the wide Atlantic rolls behind, 
Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs.” 


Bayard Taylor’s Prince Deukalion utters 


1 John v.17. ? Hebrews xiii. 8; Ephesians iv. to, 


38 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


it, in spite of something of the darkness 
which in Shelley or Byron became athe- 
istic or revolutionary : — 
“The past 

Is man’s possession, not his mocking glimpse 
Through loopholes of the jail where Reason pines. 
It gives the Prophet vision. . . 

. . » What common eye can see 
Past things as present, ancient miracle 
To-day’s dull fact, God’s hand upon the man 
It looks at? Over gulfs of ages these 
First find their sanctity, as our dark orb 
Drinks light from ether till it grows a star.” 


Over against much revolutionary poetry, 
which, like that sort of philosophy, has 
involved atheism by suggesting the ex- 
istence of a Godless moment, the evo- 
lutionary thought of all deep souls has 
presented a Unity, which, both intelligent 
and infinite in history, has inculcated a 
consistent theism. So much has been in- 
volved in this “mere theism” that the his- 
tory of the universe must be read to un- 
derstand its content. 

This unity of life in God has its mani- 


Time of the Transfiguration. 39 


festation, as does God Himself, in the 
historic Christ. The Gospels alone do not 
furnish the whole record of His influence. 
He comes to our age, not only as a being 
like the Socrates of Plato, or even of 
Xenophon, borne to us in a _biograph- 
ical sketch, and effective simply by the 
power of the truths He taught, but also 
as having for nineteen centuries revealed 
Himself by His influence upon and along 
with the forces which make history. In 
all this, the deep unity of the divine nature 
is revealed. The Oriental conception of 
this unity is strikingly presented in these 
lines : — 


“Though God extends beyond creation’s rim, 
Each smallest atom holds the whole of Him;” 


and in these, also :— 
“ Mirrors God maketh each atom in space, 
And fronteth each one with His perfect face.”! 
Just as God discloses His character and 
the meaning of His providence in each 
event in the history of the universe, so 
4 Alger, Zhe Poetry of the Orient, 


40 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Jesus Christ, His self-manifestation, puts 
His entire being and mission in such an 
event as the transfiguration. But another 
vision of His unity appears also. Just as 
the unity of God’s life is seen in the con- 
tinuity of movement and the development 
of the process and the results of divine 
government, so the unity of the life of 
Christ is seen in that growth of revealed 
truth, which not only carries the mind of 
man to greater revelations at each step, but 
also carries him just so far and by such 
means as will make the revelation as con- 
tinuous in the life of human souls as it is 
in Christ. 

I have dwelt thus long upon this point, 
because it seems to me that in the unity of 
Christ’s life, as set over against the discon- 
nectedness and broken character of every 
human life, there is evidence of the very 
divinity which flashes forth in the event 
whose place in the career of Jesus seems 
such an indication of the perfect integrity 
of His nature. The unit of His life moved 


Time of the Transfiguration. 4l 


like a constant factor through history. Its 
divine integrity made the fragmentary 
events of many generations a unity. So 
He seemed to Stephen, as related to other 
lives.! And when He is studied in relation 
to His own life, the conscious unity that 
binds one fact to another has no parallel in 
the universe, save in God, whose mani- 
festation He is. The time of the trans- 
figuration is the moment when the earth 
and skies demand it; and with an imperial 
consciousness of what His life is — a con- 
sciousness that never seems less spon- 
taneous when it is most august — He unites 
the threads of His past teaching with those 
unseen as yet in the future, in the glory of 
transfiguration. It carries out the unity 
of God, as incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. 
The choice of that night is as truly illus- 
trative of the divinity of Christ as is any- 
thing that He said. The transfiguration 
itself was the next fact which was to con- 
tinue the revelation of God in Him. And 


1 Acts vib 


42 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


so, “after six days,” or, as Luke is less 
definite, “about an eight days after these 
sayings, He took them into a mountain 
apart.” 

“ About an eight days after” what “ say- 
ings”? Sayings of whose meaning we 
may have a more just conception, if we go 
back a little in the stream and move along 
with the current of His teaching. 

His Galilean ministry? had its character- 
istic features summed up in the miracle of 
the loaves and fishes. Behind any lesson of 
the personal kindness there exhibited, in 
the unostentatious manifestation of His 
power, lay a vision, for which His previous 
dealing with these disciples had prepared 
them, of the identity of the infinite and in- 
visible in Jesus Christ. It was the moment 
when He would have them see how this 
sense of the supernatural in them gave 
them an apprehension of the infinite, and 
how near to them and in Him was the 
kingdom of the invisible. For that hour, 


1Cf. Edersheim’s Life of Christ, vol. i. p. 106 


Time of the Transfiguration. 43 


the king was enthroned in their very 
presence; and in His hands nature and 
the supernatural, the finite and infinite, 
were blended. At the touch of the in- 
visible majesty in Him, the limitations of 
the visible were destroyed, and there 
seemed to be the presence in the finite 
of the infinite. When He blessed the 
visible supply, there went into it the re- 
serve of the invisible in Him. This fact 
of the blessing of it has fixed the atten- 
tion of the four evangelists, and in one the 
eucharistic idea is prominent.! Thus, in 
the least of the incidents of this event, does 
the presence of a king and kingdom of the 
invisible assert itself.2 And it is not mar- 
velous that this should be the fact. This 
Teacher had come to found a kingdom. 
In all the changes of form which His idea 
must undergo to make itself understood, 
this conception of regency is constant. It 
so impressed the time, that Peter’s “przest- 


1 Godet, S¢. Zuke, vol. i. p. 407. 
3 Trench on Zhe Miracles, p. 96. 


44 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


hood” of believers is “voyal,’1 and He 
who came to found it is seen by the seer 
of Patmos as “king of kings.”* But it 
had many forms of statement. Its natural 
many-sidedness admitted of it. It is pro- 
claimed by John the Baptist as the “ #zzg- 
dom of heaven ;” * and this term is used by 
the lips of the Christ. It is declared to 
be the “kingdom of God” in moments 
when it is being preached by its king and 
His subjects.° Wherever it is preached or 
proclaimed, it is a kingdom of which noe 
man can say: “Lo, kereT” Gee em 
there !” “ for the kingdom of God is 
within you.”® It “cometh not with 
observation.” It is the reign of the in- 
visible in the visible, because it is the 
reign of God in Christ. To accept it 
is to throw one’s whole self and destiny 
into the hands of the invisible kingship of 
Christ. In the acceptance of it, one be- 


1] Peter ii. 9. 2 Revelation xix. 16. 
8 Matthew iii. 2. 4 Matthew vii. 11; xiii. 11. 
6 Luke ix, 27. 6 Luke xvii. 20, 21. 


Time of the Transfiguration. 45 


comes a member of the royal family of the 
invisible God. The law of Christ is the law 
of his life, —a life invisible, hid with the 
invisible majesty of Christ, in the invisible 
God. With sucha kingdom to found, and 
being such a king, the Galilean ministry 
could not be closed without some such 
manifestation. And the character of the 
miracle was inevitable from the intelligent 
unity of Christ’s life. It was, as it needs 
must be, an event where the infinite in 
Him might touch the material nature, with 
which He had to do, in a way which should 
manifest the complete subservience of the 
visible to the invisible! Soin this miracle 
He manifested the invisible kingship hid- 
den in His humiliation, and the secret of 
that kingdom, which in Him made the 
finite serve the infinite. 

All this came out of the fact that He 
saw that whatever worth the invisible had 
for Him must soon be known. The visible 
world was beginning to shiver under his 

1 Weiss, Life of Christ, vol. ii. 385. 


46 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


feet. John the Baptist had just been slain 
by order of Herod, and His own death be- 
came more evident. In the news from 
Herod’s household, He saw Calvary. So 
out of this visible life of the multitude, He 
goes into a more solitary place with His 
own disciples, -— the invisible and sad king 
of an invisible and as yet not understood 
kingdom. The unexpected crowd confronts 
Him. He will celebrate a feast. The visible 
crowd cannot take the invisible king from 
His throne, and it is then that He is not 
only an invisible king, but also the king of 
the invisible. The thousands are fed.! 
There is no break now in the current of 
this flowing soul. The invisible king is 
declaring Himself the king of the invisible, 
in a way that will lead Him and the dis- 
ciples to a moment of transfiguration. 
Still, He will seek retirement, and “ He 
cometh to Bethsaida;”* and as this in- 
visible king manifested His sovereignty 
over material nature at the lake-side, so 


1 Luke ix. 17. 2 Mark viii. 22. 


Time of the Transfiguration, 47 


here He showed his regnancy over the life 
of man in the restoration of sight to the 
blind man. The next step in its mani- 
festation must be when the invisible glows 
and illumines from its own visible shrine, 
Himself. It has touched nature and man 
with the infinite ; will it not confess its own 
hidden power ? 

The shadows were still growing more 
deep and wide. The invisible king was 
journeying on toward Hermon, passing 
through the towns of Czsarea Philippi, 
not as a guest of earth, but as a scorned 
and hated visionary. Then was the time 
when, for them and for Him, it was best to 
know how the public sentiment and their 
private faith stood. “ Whom say men that 
I am?” said He, whose very devotion to 
the invisible had exiled the nation. “ And 
they answered, Fohn the Baptist: but some 
say, Elias ; and others, one of the prophets.” 
They, even in this answer, which had no 
word of reference to His Messianic charac- 


1 Verse 27. 


48 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


ter, had stated it in the most favorable light. 
For the popularity of Jesus had gone. 
Anything that had helped them to connect 
Him with the gigantic political movements 
for which their Messiah should come had 
long ago been entirely cast aside. Public 
opinion was digging deeper than ever the 
valley of His humiliation, and to His eyes 
there had come across his path the shadow 
of death. Then, with that quality which 
belonged to the king invisible, which 
counted not on the good opinion of the 
crowd, and looked deeply into the soul of 
the individual, ever content to found a 
kingdom upon the least visible foundation, 
He said: “ Whom do ye say that I 
am?” “Thou,” said the ardent Peter, 
“art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” 
The world of the future was created. Clad 
. in humiliation, weary and sad in His solemn 
grandeur, its king stood near; and when 
He answered Peter the invisible energies 
of an eternal empire were in His hand. 


1 Verse 29. 


Time of the Transfiguration. 49 


“ Blessed art thou,’ said He, “ for flesh and 
blood hath not revealed tt unto thee, but my 
Father which is in Heaven.” The Invisible 
Himself had revealed to Peter the invisible 
kingship of Christ. 

But the entire answer is the disclosure 
of this invisible kingdom. Jesus identifies 
this confession of His invisible and divine 
kingship with the future of Peter and the 
destiny of the world. “ Thou art Peter 
(Ilérpos), and on this rock (rérpa) will I butld 
my church, and the gates of Hades shall 
not prevail against it.” Then, as though 
He would have Peter see, as did He, the 
expansiveness of his faith in the invisible 
and the naturalness with which these 
powers of the invisible should come into 
such a capable grasp, He disclosed that 
unity of divine government which makes 
His treatment of man consonant with that 
other manifestation of God in the laws of 
the world, and said: “J wiz/l give thee the 
keys of the kingdom of heaven,’ —for these 
are the powers of the invisible to which 


50 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


you open your hand,— “and whatsoever 
thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in 
heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on 
earth shall be loosed in heaven,’ 1\—“so 
surely shall the forces of the invisible in 
the Invisible Himself and in your invisible 
life be one, and so certainly has your 
faith seized, yea, so does all faith in Me 
grasp, this Invisible God whose Christ I 
am.” The church was founded and the 
lines of her immortal advance were made 
clear. Yet darkness was upon their souls, 
and His sky was overcast. 

Peter had done a bold and brave thing. 
This confession of Peter, however, did not 
release the gaze of Christ from the swift- 
coming Calvary. He saw it all. The 
philosophy of the invisible life had its 
consummate fruit in self-sacrifice. The 
crown of thorns already hung in the air 
over His head. From that moment, He 
began to indicate to them how the life of 
the invisible in Him ran toward a complete 


1 Matthew xvii. 18, 19. 


Time of the Transfiguration, 51 


self-abnegation. He wanted them to see 
how, at last, He would be driven to throw 
His very life out upon the invisible. Al- 
ways was the invisible personal and loving, 
because it was God, His Father; never- 
theless, death by suffering and as an out- 
law was sad to Him, partly because it was 
so terrible to them. In the face of such 
visions of the Messiah as would eliminate 
all dishonor from the life and destiny of 
the Jew, did He begin to point a steady 
finger to His cross. In a moment, when to 
Peter there had come words which had the 
tones of a universal triumph in them, He 
would make them see that the philosophy 
of the invisible life did not end in either 
confession or promise ; and thus “ He began 
to show unto His disciples how that He 
must go unto Ferusalem, and suffer many 
things of the elders and chief priests and 
scribes, and be killed, and the third day be 
raised up.’ ' Mingled indignation and 
pain rush into the words of Peter’s rebuke. 


1 Matthew xvii. 21. 


52 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


The man of the world seems to speak, 
while the child of the invisible is silent. 
“Lord!” he says, with a more than 
Jewish pride in his Messiah, “ Lord! be it 
far from Thee ;” and with a total blindness 
to the quality of this invisible kingship, 
he adds, “‘ 7hzs shall never be unto Thee.” 
He cannot yet conceive of the immortal 
sovereignty of the invisible. He has not 
yet seen the transfiguration, nor felt the 
power of the event which explains the 
glory of the transfiguration not less than 
that of death,—the resurrection. It is 
the slave of the visible and earthly who 
speaks. The reply came, “ Get thee behind 
me, Satan !”” —for it was Satanic to think 
of frustrating the progress of this king of 
the invisible. “ Zhou art an offence unto 
me.” What royalty hath this invisible 
king! “ For thou savourest not the things 
that be of God,’ — “thou hast not entered 
into the secrets of the invisible,” — “ dut of 
the things that be of men,” — “thou hast 
confessed the bondage of the visible.” 


Time of the Transfiguration. 53 


Then follow the great assertions which 
state the ethics of the invisible life. It is 
an unfolding of what Christ meant when 
He said: “ Follow me.” Self-denial stands 
out, with the simple but distinct promi- 
nence which its relationship to such a 
philosophy of life must give it. “Jf any 
man would come after me,’ —the hiding- 
place as well as the manifestation of God, 
— “let him deny himself,’ —\et him bury 
out of sight the visible, expedient, and 
earthly,— “and take up his cross and follow 


me.” * 


There the secret of all great life 
was made an open one, in the voluntary 
_ taking up of the cross. Criminals, who bore 
it with shame and by constraint, did not 
attach to it a vileness which a noble taking 
of it up in the self-determining soul might 
not remove. In its new associations with 
a willing and heroic devotion to the in- 
visible, which stands behind majorities 
who sneer and respectability which scorns, 
there was to come that which should make 


1 Verse 24. 


54 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


it a symbol of sainthood forever. It would 
thenceforth image the fact, in which life 
was discovered in death! and it would sug- 
gest the very nature of the event of earth, 
which, imitated in timid but sincere lives, 
should prove the death of the Galilean 
peasant to be, through all its eras, the 
most living fact in all the world. 

The teaching of the succeeding words 
is knit together by a logic which has thus 
brought out the fact that there is no real 
victory in the divine life, save the triumph 
of the invisible ; a logic which, also, as we 
shall see, makes the transfiguration, and, 
at last, the resurrection, cwo characteristic 
moments in its sure advance. But before 
either of these scenes can come, Jesus in 
His invisible kingship must make clear the 
profound sympathies of this invisible king- 
dom with certain aspects of truth and cer- 
tain duties of the hour. Those disciples 
must have been conscious of how inevitably 
out of such a conception there should come 
the truth, “Whosoever shall save his life 


Time of the Transfiguration. 55 


shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his 
life for my sake shall find it.” “For 
my sake,’ — what a sovereignty of the 
invisible did that phrase disclose! Visi- 
bly an outcast and fugitive, as truly as 
when in Mary’s lap in the manger “a 
king without regalia, a God without his 
thunder,” He was then, as ever, offering 
them no abstract philosophy of the in- 
visible, but a concrete fact, namely, Him- 
self, as the beginner, teacher, inspirer, and 
guide of an invisible life in them. “For 


» 


my sake:” it was a word that made one 
the secret of their lives and His, and made 
the last visible thing which they clung to 
— Himself —a gate into the invisible. 

It will be noticed that in the progress of 
this teaching, severe as it is to the minds 
of those disciples, Jesus relies on the 
love they bear Him, and hence upon the 
magic of Himself, to save them from the 
despair into which they were so likely to 
fall from the heights of such lofty truth. 
This is illustrated when He asks them: 


56 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


“ For what ts a man profited, if he gain the 
whole world, and lose himself?””' Here the 
issue between the visible world and the in- 
visible self is made plain, but only by put- 
ting these disciples upon the very summit 
of the lofty truth that man is in his essen- 
tial nature an invisible being. It is a 
height which makes even our philosophy 
dizzy. The wide valleys almost charm us 
into leaping from so great an altitude. 
How must the disciples have felt the won- 
drous height and the rare atmosphere! 
But their teacher knows that He can keep 
the head from being dizzy, by making the 
appeal of this truth to their hearts. He 
saves a panic of the intellect, by putting 
Himself again before their love. “ For 
whosoever shall be ashamed of me,’ He 
says, with a depth of personal feeling in 
which His invisible self touches this newly 
announced invisible selfhood in them, “of 
him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when 
He shall come in His own glory and in His 


1 Verse 26. 


Time of the Transfiguration. 57 


Father's, and of the holy angels.’ It is the 
same truth brought out of the atmosphere 
of the absolute and made relative. But 
with this disclosure of the personal rela- 
tionships, which such a truth has, there 
comes a new phase of this invisible king- 
ship and His kingdom of the invisible. The 
invisible king is in the day of humiliation 
now. Beneath these plain garments is a 
sovereign, and under them is the hiding- 
place of a divine glory. “ Verily,” said 
the prophet of the invisible One, “ Zhou 
art a God which hidest Thyself.’ These 
disciples have not been mistaken in the 
truth they have apprehended. They do 
follow the king, but He is “ the King 
immortal and invisible,’ and this fact 
Jesus has tried to teach them. By and by, 
this unseen majesty will burst forth. It 
does not now, because Jesus is founding a 
kingdom of the invisible. Shall the king 
of such a realm flaunt his royalty? Nay, 
His royal family must be children of the 


1 Isaiah xlv. 15. _ 2 Timothy i. 17. 


58 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


invisible. But the day of glory draweth 
nigh. He, the seer of the invisible, detects 
its light in the distance, as his eye flashes 
across the visible grave of Joseph of 
Arimathea. And so, when He tells them 
of these things, “ Whosoever shall be 
ashamed of me and my words” in my in- 
visible kingship on earth, “of him shall 
the Son of man be ashamed,” He makes 
vivid the hour of glory, and adds, “ when,” 
in the confessed kingship of the invisible, 
“ He cometh in His own glory, and in His 
Father's and of the holy angels.” 

There is but one danger now, — they 
will put this hour of glory on the other 
side of their life on earth. But that they 
may be assured that this kingdom of the 
invisible is to have its moments of glo- 
rious victory here, He says: “ There be 
some standing here, which shall not taste 
of death until they see the kingdom of 
God.” 3 

The instant has now come in the pro- 


1 Matthew xvi. 28. 


Time of the Transfiguration. 59 


cess of divine self-manifestation when the 
soul of man is so heavily weighted with 
the truth of the Invisible One in Christ 
that it lags behind, and, as we shall see, 
sleeps in the presence of the Incarnate 
God. In this account of the development 
of Christ’s idea, we have not been forget- 
ful of the fearful strain which these chil- 
dren of Judaism were asked to bear, that 
they might follow Him with an honest 
heart. Christ Himself, perhaps, never was 
so conscious of walking along a difficult 
way. For here that line, where the vis- 
ible and invisible meet, impossible except 
to divine feet, along which Jesus had to 
travel, becomes clearly evident to thought. 
If men had ever seen God truly, they 
would have been so familiar with the in- 
visible that they would not have expected 
a visible kingdom, however gorgeous and 
sublime. They had not seen Him, and 
Jesus must reveal Him. In person and 
influence, He must so make the Invisible 
One visible that He and His kingdom 


60 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


should ever after be known as invisible. 
The very success of the Incarnation, if in- 
dulged for a moment, would have ruined 
the result it aimed at. The seen Christ 
must incarnate the unseen God, —a task 
for Deity alone. Up to this time the 
Incarnation has been so complete that 
where the “Word” is most undoubtedly 
“made flesh,’ there the proclamation is 
most clearly made of the Invisible God. 
The development of the life of Christ is 
the growth of this profound idea and pur- 
pose, in apprehensible statement or illus- 
trative event. Event so follows statement 
that each movement in His career is an 
additional proof of how perfectly He com- 
prehends the mighty unit of His life. 
Where His lips have just ceased to move 
with the utterance of His profound faith 
in the invisible, He throws His life, until, 
at last, on Calvary, His very being, upon 
the unseen. Yet, at every step, He is less 
a weird and spectral abstraction, and more 
a concrete, personal thing. The Son of 


Time of the Transfiguration. 61 


God and the Son of man are one in His 
enlarging life. He must invite and de- 
velop their love, even if it begins in a con- 
ception of Him after a most visible sort ; 
but at the right instant, He must, in His 
love for them, turn its tide away, lest they 
lose in the incarnation the Incarnate One. 
“For about an eight days” these forces 
were at work, as never before. Death by 
the cross lay yonder before the Christ. 
The tonger He spoke, the more certain 
to them was Calvary; and eight days of 
thought must have left them between two 
worlds of thought and hope: “one dead, 
the other,” seemingly, “ powerless to be 
born.” Still they followed, led on, they 
knew not why. Nineteen centuries after, 
we can seem to see the gravitation ; for all 
these invisible forces were converging into 
an event, inevitable alike to the Christ and 
the spiritual culture of those disciples, — 
the transfiguration. 


1 : 
Ng 





eee 














LECTURE Ll. 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 


“ Forever through the world’s material forms, 
Heaven shoots its immaterial ; night and day 
Apocalyptic intimations stray 
Across the rifts of matter.’”” 





LECTURE III. 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 


“He took Peter, James, and John, and went up into a moun- 
tain apart to pray.’’— Luxe ix. 28, with MATTHEW xvii. 1, and 


Mark ix, 2. 


T is not that the earthly spot of 
a4| this significant event may be de- 
ais} termined that the student of 
Christ’s life stops at the mountain’s base 
and looks upward towards its summit, but 





that, from His choice of the mountain the 
character of His companionship, and the 
acknowledged purpose of prayer, there 
may be found the place in the geography 
of the soul’s life where naturally such an 
incident might occur. The traditional 
view points to Mount Tabor. But per- 
haps St. Jerome neglected to note how, 
from ancient times, it had been crowned 
with fortifications and known the publicity 


66 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


of acity upon its summit. Nevertheless, 
the churches which have crowded to the 
supposed spot, and that monastery, now 
thirteen centuries old, stand to note the 
vitality of the tradition. Nothing has so 
pointed away from Tabor, to a mountain 
near Czesarea Philippi, as the improba- 
bility of an unmentioned journey which 
must have been made within the few days 
intervening, and the fact that Mark, after 
recording events subsequent to the trans- 
figuration, says, “ 7hey departed thence 
and passed through Galilee.” It was, 
most probably, one of the spurs of Her- 
mon, where the vapors of summer floating 
in that loftier atmosphere are condensed 
at the touch of the snow-crowned summit, 
and those clouds are formed, one of which 
may have swept before the gaze of the 
disciples while they looked upon the trans- 
figured One. 

Uncertain as this must ever be, the 
place of the transfiguration of Jesus Christ 


1 Mark ix. 30. 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 67 


in the unnamed holy land of the spir- 
itual life is more sure. The mountain- 
height on which naturally such an issuing 
forth of the Infinite through the finite 
ever occurs, is a result from the opera- 
tion of forces, of which the strata of the 
spiritual world preserve the record. As 
a physical relationship appears to the geol- 
ogist between Sinai, Hermon, and Calvary, 
so these seemingly isolated points in the 
experience of the human soul may be seen 
to have been uplifts from the level plain 
of consciousness, by the action of resist- 
less spiritual forces. In a sense more Em- 
ersonian than Swedenborgian, “ the world 
is the mirror of the soul.’”’! As actual, to 
the true soul, are the facts of the ideal 
as are those of the real world? No ex- 
haustive catalogue of the distances which: 
separate them or of the relationships 


1 Address to Divinity Students. Emerson’s Works, 
vol. i, 

2 Lotze, Mikrocosmos, Book IV. chap. iii.; Hill, 7he- 
ology of the Sciences, p. 29. 


68 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


which bind them has been made; yet they 
act and re-act throughout the universe. 
Christ’s whole life showed with what sov- 
ereignty they move on. And here we 
find that same unity of life with which His 
nature dominated His career, uniting such 
of these facts into one that, whatever 
doubt there may be in our geography of 
the seen world, there can be none in 
that of the unseen as to where the trans- 
figuration —the flash of the unseen glory 
through the seen humiliation —did and 
must ever occur. 

I. In Jesus Christ, the seen and unseen 
were in unique companionship. So His 
attitude to the seen was always in perfect 
harmony with His relations unto the un- 
seen world. By His being the revelation 
of the one, He became, especially by His 
use and treatment of the other, its revealer 
also. So vital was this union in Him that 
whatever He did, involving a use of na- 
ture, became a revelation of His grace. 
Of this fact we have proof, not only in the 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 69 


use He made of mustard-seed and lily as 
they were taken up in the language of His 
lips, but also in that use which He made 
of Genesareth and Hermon as they were 
taken up in the language of His life. 
Here, His seeking the mountain is a subtle 
but powerful revelation of the quality and 
meaning of the next truth which He had 
to speak. And, as it was truth which 
must be uttered without words, so, silently, 
He goes into the mountain to pray. 

This use of that mountain brings again 
to mind that unity of life which ever came 
from the unity of His nature. Twice 
before has He sought the mountain for 
prayer. Each time He reveals the qual- 
ity of the unseen kingdom which He has 
come to found, and its profound relation to 
that consciousness of infinity, of which I 
have spoken. Once, a vision of earthly 
glory had swept like a flood over those 
who heard Him. The thought of the 
Messianic triumph had seized the people. 
They were about to compel Him into the 


70 ~—«~‘The Transfiguration of Christ. 


championship of their idea of material 
splendor and the leadership of their hosts. 
Just as now, going up the mountain of 
transfiguration, He sees His cross in the 
gulf between His idea and theirs, so then 
He must have seen the coming solitude of 
Calvary as He sought the solitude of those 
mountains. Before that time, He had 
done likewise. It was for a moment's sol- 
itude before the sermon on the mount. 
In both cases, we may see how Jesus dig- 
nifies nature, in His use of it. What min- 
istries He here shows, lying unemployed 
by needy souls, in the world of mountain 
and valley! The body and soul are so re- 
lated that the one, touched by the pure air, 
and the other, influenced by the healthful 
word of Christ, seem to live a new life, 
each for the other, in a new universe. 
Sacred enough to Him was every breath 
of that mountain air. It blessed a body 
through which a truth should soon be 
more surely seen, which would explain 
nature and the soul. The sublimity of 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 71 


that suggestive spot ministered its em- 
bodied charm to Him whose sublimity 
should make earth the most interesting 
spot in the universe. That wide outlook 
under the quiet stars became somewhat 
harmonious with the sweep of horizon 
which He entertained and gave to the hu- 
man soul. 

The truth of nature fell, with a primal 
ease and naturalness, into the hands of 
the truth itself. It is not strange that the 
self-manifestation of God in Christ should 
so use nature as that it would appear to 
have something of the same truth to tell 
which was the message of Christ. It was 
a truth told, however, in a different lan- 
guage. 

It is a quite superficial theism whose 
God goes not out contemporaneously and 
harmoniously in Creation in nature and in 
Incarnation in Jesus Christ. The corre- 
spondent truths of nature and Christ are at 
root one truth, working itself out in its 
dual revelation. Creation and Incarnation 


72 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


lie in the nature of Love. The subjective 
personal God urges Himself into objec- 
tivity of life. Creation is the manifesta- 
tion of God in the unconscious objectivity 
of nature; Incarnation is the manifesta-_ 
tion of God in the conscious subjectivity 
and objectivity of Jesus, the Christ. In 
Christ, God sees Himself as perfectly man- 
ifested. 

Out of these relations of nature and 
Christ in God came the Christ’s attitude 
toward and use of nature. Looking upon 
Him, as that poetic soul who receives 
such dainty patronage in certain circles, 
He seems the mystic Voice which could 
aSSerec —— 

“To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” 
As a man only, He might have climbed 
up the mountain side that He should have 
such moments as were Wordsworth’s, of 
which the poet of Rydal Mount has said: 


“ Oft in these moments such a holy calm 
Would overspread my soul that bodily eyes 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 73 


Were entirely forgotten, and what I saw 
Appeared like something in myself, a dream, 
A prospect of the mind.” 


But the attitude of the Christ toward 
nature was not that of a listener for its 
secret. He Himself was its secret. In 
that “presence which disturbs” the be- 


holder, 
é “With the joy 


Of elevated thoughts : a sense sublime 

Of something far more deeply interfused, 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

And the round ocean, and the living air, 

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 

A motion and a spirit that impels 

All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, 

And rolls through all things,” 
it was His to feel the thrill of a preéx- 
istent life, —a life which was His before 
the worlds were created; to be conscious 
on earth of the hour in eternity when by 
Him the worlds were framed, when the 
Word which was in the beginning was 
with God, as it was God; and, as “the 
Word made flesh,” to see nature in the 
light of Himself. As the Incarnate God, 


74 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


He had a unique attitude toward nature. 
The God-created “lily of the field” must 
appear in its real significance to God’s 
Incarnate Self. If it was truth of lily 
or of mustard seed, it passed through the 
divine consciousness which in simple self- 
utterance had said, “J am the Truth.” » 
As He travelled up that mountain path, 
He must have realized this and vastly 
more. He could not tell the disciples, 
for they were already unable to bear in- 
telligently the gifts of truth which He had 
disclosed to them. 

All this, from the divine side, was in the 
experience of Him whose body, then and 
there, stood for nature’s achievement. Be- 
hind it stood the entire creation. As that 
weary body made its way up that moun- 
tain side, it seemed to be stepping upon an 
unread page in its own biography. That 
mountain had been lifted by a world-pain 
“with which the whole creation had been 
groaning until now.”* Along together, in 


1 John xiv. 6. ; 2 Romans viii. 22. ° 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 75 


this use of nature, do the facts of the Cre- 
ation and the Incarnation lie, as they are 
seen to lie in the being and life of God. 
It was natural that God should go forth 
into Incarnation in Christ. From the up- 
per side of the problem of Christ’s human 
life we note a supreme naturalism. This 
is the side of the Incarnation. But it was 
also natural to nature itself that, at last, 
a goal should appear which should justify 
these painful experiences, ever brighter as 
their results seemed to be in their long 
reign. From the lower side of the prob- 
lem of Christ’s human life, also, we note a 
supreme naturalism. This is the side of 
Creation. Thus nature, coming up out of 
infinity, moving on in circles of devel- 
opment with an infinite dynamic, found 
itself, through the continuity and in the 
goal of Creation, with the human body of 
the Nazarene. The Christ, coming down 
out of that same infinity, the self-manifes- 
tation of God, was conscious of the In- 
finite in this same human body. Creation 


76 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


and Incarnation were thus one in the 
Christ of God, as before the morning stars 
sang together they were one in God. 
Jesus had, in His self-conscious life, the 
objectivity of nature and the subjectivity 
of God. That mountain marked a mo- 
ment in nature when, and a place where, 
the two lines of God’s manifestation in 
Creation and in Incarnation were approach- 
ing each other, though with agony which 
pained the planet in its travail. “ The 
whole creation groaneth and travaileth to- 
gether in pain until now,” —this was the 
fact beneath NHermon’s white-crowned 
magnificence. And Jesus Christ, with 
these unspoken meanings which nature 
had to Him alone, went forward to these 
scenes of transfiguration, where the ever- 
fresh agony of that world-pain, growing 
yet more intense and keen, as in man’s 
history the creature should groan “for the 
mantfestations of the sons of God,” should 
be, for a moment, apprehended in the is- 


1 Romans viii. 19. 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 77 


sues it bore, and understood in the glory of 
its hero, saint, martyr, and God. 

II. The place of the transfiguration was 
not only a place where Jesus was thus re- 
lated to nature: it was a place also where 
He related Himself with the universe in 
prayer. The fact of its being a place of 
prayer before it was the place of transfigu- 
ration will furnish us with opportunity to 
find, in the attitude and bearing of Jesus, 
the nature of prayer and the naturalness 
of such an event as the transfiguration 
to the praying Christ. Prayer, as it is 
seen in Jesus of Nazareth, involves a per- 
fect faith in the Supreme Power of the 
universe as good! Not only does God 
reveal Himself personally in Christ as 
the eternal goodness, but Christ in His at- 
titude toward the universe outside of Him 
seems constantly to confront a Power 
Supreme which is paternal in the aims 
of government and beneficent in their 
accomplishment. The Zezt-Gezst, which 

ar Liddon, Some Elements of Religion, p. 164. 


78 The Transfiguration of Christ, 


is thought to offer no prayer, never- 
theless confronts in its science, which is 
supposed to give the basis for this hos- 
tility, a universe whose laws seem the 
method of a Power whose end in govern- 
ment is good. The Infinite Somewhat 
seems to have in aim, at least, 
“One far-off divine event 
To which the whole creation moves.” 

Advancing science is nearer, than on yes- 
terday, to the confession that the “All- 
Great zs the All-Loving, too.” With 
Jesus, the fact at the base and summit of 
things was the Infinite Goodness. Modern 
thought seems about to grant that this, 
the first truth of the Incarnation, is the 
last revealed truth of Creation. Science 
is crowding it to the front. Mr. Huxley is 
unable even to cry down the “tone of op- 
timism” in the speech of the evolutionist ; 


1 The Supernatural in Nature, p. 148; Fowle, Recon- 
ciliation of Religion and Science, p.210 ; Stewart and Tait, 
The Unseen Universe, p. 224; Hanna’s Life and Letters 
of Thomas Erskine, 4th Edinburgh ed., p. 360. 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 79 


and he tells us that Du Bois Reymond, in 
a lecture on Leibnitz, “seriously argues 
that the doctrine of evolution supplies a 
scientific equivalent to that philosopher’s 
remarkable conception of the best of all 
possible worlds.” ! It is more significant 
when we remember the littleness of our 
world, in the eyes of the modern spirit, 
and are not therefore compelled logically 
to deal with it in quite so absolute a man- 
ner. 

It is certain that, whatever may be the 
force of the statement that nature seems 
full of cruelty and pain, there is a silent 
approach unto higher forms of life. Nat- 
ural order has its law of death and resur- 
rection. With the sacrifice of the unfit 
comes the survival of the fittest. The 
laws which have made it so hard for man 
to exist at all, the severest of them, are 
the ones which seem most heavily loaded 
with his destiny. Man has travelled over 
boiling abysses, from the obedience of one 


1 Article “Evolution,” Zucyc. Britannica. 


80 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


law to the obedience of the next. The 
hardest to obey was the safest stone he 
could risk himself upon. The event to- 
ward which the Supreme Power has aimed 
was so important, the aim was so direct, 
that the track along which force flies is 
walled with adamant. It is always flying: 
nature is its path, being, as it is, the about 
to be born. Now and then, it looks like 
retrogression. The Pterodactyls and Di- 
nosaurians have ceased to exist, and thus 
the two higher orders of reptiles have 
departed. But the aim of God was sure. 
The law of one life has broken, or rather 
opened out, into the law of another. Birds 
have superseded the Pterodactyls, and 
mammals have walked in the wake of the 
Dinosaurians. The nature, which became 
the graveyard of the lower, became the 
cradle of the higher. Like John, from 
Patmos, our science sees “an angel stand- 
ing in the sun.” + 

But, it is said, grant to prayer its vision 


1 Revelation xix. 17. 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 8&1 


of a good power, yet that power has a 
method, with which prayer must have and 
can have nothing to do, which is law. 
The answer is not only that, if this is the 
method of a good power, the soul wants 
not to change it, that the highest prayer is 
“ Thy will be done,” but that, also, prayer 
is the act by which the soul puts itself 
in such relationship to this law that it 
comes into contact with forces which 
would not touch it otherwise, which it is 
the will of goodness to give after its order, 
which is law. Prayer is the step of the 
soul into the region of the higher law. 
We see a lower law break or open out into 
a higher in nature. That seems consti- 
tutional. Do they not thus break — the 
lower into the higher — until the Power 
Supreme, who is His own method, girds 
whole with Himself ? Each law’s authority 
is taken up into the one above it; and 
prayer is not a thrust at the authority of 
the lower law, which touches it, but a move- 
ment toward the very source of its author- 
6 


82 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


ity, —a movement which brings it within 
the range of a higher law and its benefit.! 
This view of the nature of the law and its 
source, which has endured much repeti- 
tion, seems never to have been de- 
stroyed. 

Christ was one with this source; and He 
was true to the method of the divine na- 
ture, as it affects us in prayer. In His 
prayers, we see that He lives not in one 
universe in action, and in another in 
prayer; but that it is the same universe 
with one government, whose laws are a 
unit.2, By His native and preéxistent re- 
lation to the universe, by what the laws of 
the universe were to Him through His 
sinlessness and positive holiness, He, in 
prayer, touched the law along which the 
infinite glory travels, and His face was 

1 Salmon, Zhe Reign of Law and other Sermons, 
p. 32; Romanes, Christian Prayer and seneral Laws, 


p. 64. 

2 Kennard, Unity of the Material and Spiritual 
Worlds, p. 116; Abbott, Zirough Nature to Christ, p 
129. 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 8&3 


flooded with radiance. Yet all this was in 
harmony with the same laws of the divine 
order with which the weakest disciple has 
to do, and does not injure the conception 
of prayer which is a comfort to devout 
souls.! What, by nature, was His relation 
to the universe, we, praying in His name, 
through His intercession, obtain by grace; 
and by our taking hold of God, through a 
personal holiness founded upon His, we 
touch laws, in prayer, higher than those 
whose benefit is ours without it. Many 
are the blessings which thus lie above us, 
just as, until that night, there was wait- 
ing, in the very heart of the universe, a 
transfiguration for Him. 

III. The place of the transfiguration was 
a place of solitude and yet of companion- 
ship. I put the fact of human companion- 
ship alongside the fact of Christ’s Divine 
solitude in order that in it we may see, 
first, another disclosure of the spirit of 
Christ in His ideal and real life; and, 


1 Jellett, The Efficacy of Prayer, p. 28. 


84 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


secondly, that we may gain the lesson of 
the uses of Christian solitude and com- 
panionship. 

In the nature of Christ, we have seen 
how the ideal and real were both actual 
to Him, and were united naturally in 
His life. The ideal reserves its treas- 
ures, for the solitary moments, in merely 
human lives. A man of the greatest in- 
tellectual power will hardly do more than 
to bring into contact, even in his intel- 
lectual life, these two worlds, as we call 
them. For the reason that in man’s 
spiritual life the two worlds are not one, 
he is accustomed to talk of two sets of 
laws, not always even harmonious: one 
for the realm of the real, the other for 
the ideal. Nature and spirit, earth and 
heaven, the finite and infinite, have been 
so divorced in the actual life of mankind 
that the mind has recognized two systems 
of government. In Jesus Christ, how- 
ever, they are one. The one integral Life 
makes an unbroken universe. Truth and 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 85 


life are one in the Truth and the Life. 
By what Jesus Christ is to the soul of the 
Christian, each disciple has in Him an un- 
shattered universe, whose “natural super- 
naturalism” flows from the Word, by 
whom, in the beginning, it existed! All 
this Jesus shows in His transfiguration. 
It began in a place and moment of soli- 
tariness. The weary disciples, however, 
were soon within its influence, as it burst 
forth into all the realms of Christ’s infinite 
nature. The higher it reaches into the 
ideal world, the deeper it goes into the 
real world. As it rises into the ideal realm 
of Moses and Elias, it runs down to rouse 
the sleeping realism of Peter, James, and 
John. Out of solitude the transfigured 
One goes into companionship, which, on 
the one side, takes Him further into the 
solitude of God, and, on the other, takes 
Him deeper into the companionship of 
man. It all shows the unity, which was 
infinite in its inclusiveness, in the nature 
and life of Christ. 


1 John i. 1, 2. 


86 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


These, solitude and companionship, each 
modifying the other, each the more divine 
for the other’s influence, are thus so 
distinctly used, and are yet so unitedly 
one fact in the life of Jesus, that by them 
we see how inevitably the spot of His 
transfiguration takes its place as most dear 
to both the practical and the ideal realms of 
human life. It was not His first hour of 
solitude. His very nature made Him sol- 
itary. By the infinity within Him, the 
man Christ Jesus was alone. That infin- 
ity of nature urged Him along lines which 
would have made Him lonely, had not this 
unique soul been self-centred in God. “J 
have trodden the winepress alone”) was not 
a prophecy only, but the record which the 
consciousness of Christ made of its past. 
“Tam not alone, because the Father is with 
me’ * was the record which His conscious- 
ness of infinity in God made of itself. 
“ My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken 
Me?” was that line of autobiography 


1 Isaiah Ixiii. 3. 2 John xvi. 10. % Matt. xxvii. 46. 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 87 


which records the moment when He was 
to realize that there was only one In- 
finite, and that itwas He. In that solitude 
ended the education of Jesus, and in that 
loneliest moment the ideal fact of His 
Deity became real to Him and the world. 
In that hour He found in His own person 
the companionship of God. 

But in all these moments this Sox of 
God was also the Sox of man. In the de 
velopment of His self-consciousness, from 
a child, these conceptions had ever gone 
together. A heavenly and earthly compan- 
ionship was His. On the one side, there 
was the Infinite Love; on the other, the 
loveless race of men. As His soul grew 
receptive and intelligent of the Divine 
Love, He felt more keenly the woe of hu- 
man sin. It was the gathering meaning 
of these two facts to Him that led Him 
to take Peter, James, and John with Him. 
As the one heavenly fact broke with its 
inherent glory, He would have the other 
earthly fact blessed by its radiance. The 


88 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


glory of God and the good of man are 
ever one in the life of Christ. It is not 
that He may have some private and indi- 
vidual renewal of the old glory which He 
had with the Father in the beginning, but 
that, as He becomes more conscious of 
His own power, men may become more 
sure of their possessions in Him. Christ 
is always saying, “ The glory which Thou 
gavest Me I have given unto them, that they 
may be one.” } 

Thus, the deeper we go into His native 
solitude, the nearer we come to the reason 
of this companionship. The lonely Christ 
was lonely for man’s sake. His was not 
the lofty isolation of an exclusive and im- 
perious dignity, but that of a Being who 
would so solve the problem of human life, 
by being alone, that whatever He was, or 
might have, would be inclusive of human- 
ity. He had, as a mere man, the loneli- 
ness of genius. It will be necessary to 
read only the greatest, who have not ac- 
cepted His lordship over their souls, to 


1 John xvii. 22. 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 89 


find the depth of that solitariness Alone 
in the times in which He lived, He rises 
out of that multitude which thronged the 
Orient with a dignity and grandeur all 
His own. Consider Him with Earth’s 
great names, and His own comes forth 
with a quiet but sure glory which leaves 
none with which to compare Him. The 
very cosmopolitanism of His thought 
seems only to make Him more supreme in 
His solitude. In the special realms of 
truth, sentiment, and purpose, where He 
seems likeliest to find peers, He is most 
peerless ; and He appears all the more sol- 
itary in this very fact that He so sur- 
passes the supreme souls in each sphere of 
man’s interior life that no one sphere can 
claim Him as peculiarly its own. The 
very peculiarities of His solitude make 
Him more solitary. Other souls which 
are removed into such lofty realms by 
their native height share the frigidity of 
the exalted space, and partake of the great 
distances which separate them from man- 
1 Cf. Renan’s Zz, concluding words, 


90 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


kind. They constantly reveal a life to 
which they can give no invitation to the 
crowd below. Where Christ is highest 
He is nearest to men. At the moment 
of His supreme exaltation, He is commu- 
nicating its vision and urging the race 
through the gates He has opened. When 
He brings His life up to the truth which 
He has found in His soul, and throws Him- 
self out upon its trusted infinitude, He is 
dying for the privilege of man to reach 
just such mental and moral manhood. 
Alone, man for whom He dies is His com- 
panion. Suffering —the very fact which 
binds men in the companionship of grief 
— was the fact on which Jesus rose at once 
into a supremacy none could share, and 
into a companionship with every child of 
sorrow for whose deliverance He then gave 
His life. Solitude and companionship, — 
the very loneliness of His nature making 
him the more sensitive in conscious grief 
over man’s woe, at the moment when He 
saw the world, for which He was dying, 


The Place of the Transfiguration. 91! 


give the death-bearing blow! On and on, 
into deeper solitude, did He go, as the 
long agony of Calvary lingered, until, at 
last, of God Himself He seemed bereft, 
as He cried, “ My God, my God, why hast 
Thou forsaken Me?”+1 when He was so 
driven to identify Himself with the In- 
finite One that, in perfect solitude of 
earth and heaven, God and man, who had 
both seemed to forsake Him, were made 
one in His inclusive soul. At the moment 
of His crucifixion by mankind, every child 
of Adam was in His heart. “ Father,’ He 
prayed, “forgive them, for they know not 
what they do.” * 

So it comes that the possibility of our 
companionship with Christ lies in the fact 
that He was solitary in nature and suffer- 
ing. May we so partake of His life that 
we shall have no moments when our per- 
sonal blessings shall not reach mankind. 


1 “ That voice of utter loneliness in the death-strug- 
gle, that entirely credible utterance, because it could 
never have been invented.” — SCHENKEL, Characterbild 
Fesu, p. 308. 

2 Luke xxiii. 34. 





LECTURE IV. 
The Transfigured Christ. 


“Dei Voluntas Rerum Natura Est.”? — AUGUSTINE. 


“In vast inorganic masses God discovers Himself as the supreme, 
creative, and sustaining force. In the graduated orders of vital power 
which range throughout the animal and vegetable worlds God unveils 
His activity as the fountain of all life. In man, a creature exercising 
conscious reflective thought and free self-determining will, God pro- 
claims Himself a free, intelligent agent. Man may, if he will, reveal 
much more than this of the glory of God; he may shed forth by the 
free movement of his will rays of God’s moral glory, of love, of mercy, 
of purity, of justice. But whether each man will make this higher 
revelation depends not upon the necessary constitution of his nature, 
but upon the free codperation of his will with the designs of God. 
God, however, is obviously able to create a being who will reveal 
Him perfectly and of necessity as expressing his perfect image and 
likeness before his creatures. All nature points to such a being as 
its climax and consummation. And such a being is the archetypal 
manhood assumed by the Eternal Word. It is the climax of God’s 
creation; it is the climax also of God’s Self-revelation. At this 
point, God’s creative activity becomes entirely one with His Self- 
revealing activity. The Sacred Manhood is a creature, yet it is 
indissolubly united to the Eternal Word. It differs from every 
other created being in that God personally tenants it. So far, then, 
are Incarnation and Creation from being antagonistic conceptions of 
the activity of God that the absolutely perfect creature only exists 
as a perfect reflection of the Divine glory. In the Incarnation, God 
creates only to reveal, and He reveals perfectly by that which He 
creates. ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we 
beheld His glory,’’? — Lippon. 


LECTURE IV. 
The Transfigured Christ. 


“* And as He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was altered, 
and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white and 
glistering.”” — MATTHEW xvii. 2; LuKE ix. 29. 


BWA Ave|l is time now for us reverently 
SOE 





to look into that transfigured 
face. But before us stretch im- 
measurable distances in thought and senti- 
ment; and we are compelled to look through 
nineteen hundred years of such constantly 
changing life as would warn us against 
expecting to discover the same radiance 
in the face of the Nazarene as was visible 
in what our age denotes as the earlier twi- 
light hours, when belief was young and 
traditions blossomed everywhere. Indeed, 
our time, somewhat over-conscious that it 
is possessed of the critical spirit, and that 
thus it becomes the revealer and _inter- 


96 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


preter of past ages, has many voices which 
insist that it is manifestly impossible for 
us to have the same emotions or to learn 
the same lessons at the foot of Hermon 
as did these men, since the intellectual 
point of view and the spiritual atmosphere 
which may be ours are so radically different 
from those of Peter, James, and John, and 
since, to be plain, the problem which inter- 
ests us is not at all the same problem to 
which they so willingly devoted their re- 
markable experiences. 

Christian thought, however, declines to 
accept all this. On the contrary, it is 
maintained that while nearly nineteen cen- 
turies have rolled between us and them, 
the intellectual point of view and spir- 
itual atmosphere which were contributed 
through them to the world have more than 
held their own, and that it is impossible 
for serious thinkers to escape them. As 
to the questions which confront us, it must 
be held that there is testimony on every 
hand to show that the problem which lies 


The Transfigured Christ. 97 


most fundamental to any true science or 
complete philosophy, whose clamor for so- 
lution is just now pronounced, is at root 
precisely that to whose solution are given 
the flashes of glory which, after so many 
years of modifying life, still penetrate the 
night-air of the world. There is but one 
great problem in all times. Its ever-vary- 
ing statement is the unimpeachable tes- 
timony to the agreement, in the presence 
of many differences, between the merely 
intellectual and the spiritual life. Philos- 
ophy will make the problem impersonal 
and intellectual; ethics will make it per- 
sonal and spiritual. Modern life has the 
same mighty environment which from the 
beginning has interested, astonished, and 
bewildered man. That environment we 
call “the universe.’ Our present think- 
ing has insisted strongly that it knows and 
can deal with its physical nature and char- 
acteristics only. But our present thinking 
has insisted upon this, with such large ad- 
missions as to the postulates of knowledge 


</ 


98 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


and ground of things, with such a wealth 
of metaphysical lore, supplying a some- 
what rich vocabulary with such new terms 
as ‘‘atom,” “energy,” “correlation,” “evo- 
lution,” and the like, that it has taught the 
age how idealistic the surest realism be- 
comes when it seeks to give any account 
of itself ; and it has made it as certain that 
the nineteenth century will close with the 
eye of man resting on the infinite as it 
was that this century opened with the eye 
of man resting on the finite. That this 
infinite is not yet acknowledged to be the 
Infinite One of our creeds and love is of 
no more vital importance than it is that 
Force, which confessedly moves toward 
Goodness, is not called Father. One thing 
seems safe; and it often looks like the bril- 
liant child of materialistic parents, — the 
super-material. One thing is certain, and 
appears as the once unacknowledged com- 
panion of physics ; and that is metaphysics. 
What such storm and stress have joined 
together are not likely to be put asunder. 


The Transfigured Christ. 99 


Our point of view may, therefore, be 
near enough to that of these simple- 
hearted disciples for us to feel that their 
panic is but the spiritual phase of our intel- 
lectual unrest, and that, being one at root, 
these problems are not wholly unrelated 
in their solution. “How have things come 
to be as they are, and, being in existence, 
why do they behave as they do?”’ — that is 
the problem of nineteenth-century thought. 
“ What does our Master mean, and how will 
He justify what He has said?” —this was 
the problem in the minds of Peter, James, 
and John. Let us note how nearly they 
come together: one so intellectual and 
abstract, the other so spiritual and con- 
crete. Jesus had been speaking to the 
disciples of an unseen kingdom which was 
the kingdom of the unseen. Never yet 
had it seemed to have any reference to the 
enigmas of life and phenomena with which 
Thales and Plato had dealt. Our recent 
thought has been speaking to the most in- 
telligent of an unseen kingdom, which is 


100 =6The Transfiguration of Christ. 


also the kingdom of the unseen. Never 
yet, to many at least, has it seemed to 
have any reference to the wonders of love 
and grace which Fénelon and Augustine 
have considered. It is only necessary, 
however, to linger with the physicist with 
his metaphysics, and to call in the Chris- 
tian moralist with his keen appreciation of 
the sensible and material world, to see that 
what will solve one problem must solve 
the other. The universe is one. John and 
Clerk-Maxwell, Peter and Mr. Tyndall, 
James and Pasteur, have questions to be 
answered which come close to each other 
in one root. The disciples of Jesus will 
find the inspirations and consolations of 
the spiritual life in the Mediatorial Christ, 
“by whom the worlds were created ;” and 
His transfiguration will be the lustrous 
moment in which they may catch a 
glimpse of the nature of things. The 
disciples of honest thought seem sure to 
find the postulates and conclusions of the 
intellectual life in a created world, whose 


The Transfigured Christ. 101 


transfiguration will be seen, only when the 
nature of things is found to be the Logos 
of God,—the word unspoken until the 
Incarnation, then spoken, — “the ground- 
fact,” the “final end” of all things. 
Certainly, our most reckless materialism 
would confess, since matter has grown in- 
tractable and will not submit to any ma- 
terialistic account of itself, that such an 
event as the transfiguration is reported to 
have been would be full of interest as re- 
vealing, perhaps, some of the possibilities 
of matter, and indicating the presence 
either of unknown potencies and laws, or 
at least of unknown manifestations of those 
which were familiar. Materialism has 
helped to do so much for theology that 
a scientific theologian would accept this 
proposition, and add to it a belief in the 
historic place of that scene amidst the 
phenomena of our world, which as yet no 
arguments have pronounced absurd. As 
they come together, it will be found that 
what Christian thought has in the life 


102 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


of Jesus is just what is demanded by the 
philosopher for the centre of a complete 
cosmology. There is that in matter which 
makes it unaccountably instinct with the 
forces of development. Into perpetually 
higher phases of existence it is ever push- 
ing itself. It is bounded and traversed 
with laws, which seem systematically re- 
lated one to another. Their operation is 
such that the whole body of laws points 
unmistakably upward. The drift of things 
is much more surely upward, to some such 
glorification and manifestation as is this 
which we are studying, than it is down- 
ward, to disorganization and death. Man 
crowns it all, — the microcosm, refusing to 
believe in death, carrying up into his being 
the surge of these upward-working ener- 
gies and determining his own destiny. 
He can at least sing this :— 


“ Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail? 
What I aspired to be, 
And was not, comforts me ; 
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the 
scale.” 


The Transfigured Christ. 103 


Somehow, at its centre, there are to be 
found the key to all this movement and 
the reason of its direction. Thecause of it 
must be its reason. A cause must be ade- 
quate in quality as well as in quantity, for 
effects. Whatever that “cause,” “reason,” 
or “final end” is, matter has within it that 
which makes ascent and has prophecy. It 
is with such facts as these that one grows 
ready to read certain partially neglected 
passages of Scripture. 

The only one of the three Evangelists 
present on the mount of transfiguration 
was John. It is a significant fact that, 
preceding and along with what seems his 
reference to the Transfigured One, there 
is given that conception of Jesus of Naza- 
reth which, while it has most to suggest to 
the phases of thought to which attention 
has been drawn, most thoroughly illumines 
the event and makes it live with profound- 
est meanings. “ Azd the Word was made 
flesh, and dwelt among us,” he says, “and,” 
he adds, “we beheld His glory, the glory 


104 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


as of the only begotten of the Father, full 
of grace and truth,” 1 

The Gospel according to John has been 
called “the new Genesis.” The writer of 
the old Genesis had so far known God and 
His universe that he began the story with 
the simple but sublime statement: “ Jz the 
beginning God created the heavens and the 
carth.’* The writer of the new had so 
far seen God in Christ, had so far discov- 
ered that this now spoken Word of God 
was primarily back of the physical uni- 
verse in the depths of the unspoken, as the 
Idea and Ideal of Creative Power, and 
hence, as the final end and means by which 
He should act, that he began his account 
of the universe, in which he saw every 
physical feature and force bound up with 
spiritual events and forces, by saying: “lz 
the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos 
was with God, and the Logos was God. By 
Him were all things made.” * 

Now, in the transfiguration of Christ, 


1jJohni.14. ?Genesisi.t. *% Johni. 1, 3. 


The Transfigured Christ. 105 


the physical universe, with its laws and 
forces, is involved, as well as the imperial 
personage of the Christian faith. Here, 
however, in this doctrine of the Lagos, in 
Creation and in Incarnation, there are to 
be found an intellectual point of view and 
a spiritual atmosphere which will enable 
us to see their relationship. In its very 
nature, this truth of the Logos is the 
illumination of all other truth. It must 
thus be tested, — “a light not to see, but 
to see with.” Never until every such event 
in the life of the Nazarene be approached, 
so that we may look upon both Him and 
the physical universe from this point of 
view and in this atmosphere, can we be 
delivered from bewilderment and gloom. 
This is not the place in which to review 
long and learned discussions on the mean- 
ing of this suggestive word. Athanasius 
has been followed with satisfactory pre- 
cision in the assertion of its large double 
meaning, Verbum et Ratio Cardinal New- 


1 Excursus, in Handy Volume Commentary on Fohn. 


106 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


man’s statement is important, in which he 
says: “A distinction had already been ap- 
plied by the Stoics to the Platonic Logos, 
which they represented under two aspects, 
the évéidGeros, and the zpodopixéds, 2, ¢., the 
internal thought and purpose of God, and 
its external manifestation, as if in words 
spoken. The terms were received into 
the church; the évéudberos standing for the 
Word, as hid from everlasting in the bosom 
of the Father, while the zpodopixes was the 
Son sent forth into the world in apparent 
separation from God, with His Father’s 
name and attributes upon Him and His 
Father’s will to perform.” ! 

The processes of Creation and Incarna- 
tion have already been spoken of as hav- 
ing their explanation and goal in Christ 
Jesus. From this, which is a different line 
of thought, the suggestion comes that the 
Logos —the once unspoken, but now 
spoken, word, the Reason of God — is the 
sublime fact in both. Creation is, “ be- 

1 History of the Arians, vol. ii. 3, 2, 


The Transfigured Christ. 107 


cause of Him,” “according to Him,” ‘in 
Him ;” and since this Reason of God as 
manifested is mediatorial,! it is “through 
Him,” and “by Him were all things made 
that were made.” The Incarnation is this 
Reason spoken, uttered forth, embodied, — 
“the Logos was made flesh and dwelt among 
us.” Unuttered, the Logos was the Rea- 
son for Creation, the Reason of Creation, 
Reason in Creation. Uttered, the Logos 
is the ever-present illumination and key 
of existence, — Jesus the Christ. From 
the beginning to the end, this is His office 
and nature. “Before all things,” zporo- 
toxos macys xticews “the first-born of all 
Creation,’ 2 and “the First-fruits of 
them that slept.” Jesus is thus the ra- 
tional end of creation, because He was its 
reason in the beginning. To our won- 
der and darkness amidst the problems, He 
is “the Light of the world.” As the un- 
manifested Logos, He is the motive power 


1Steward, Mediatorial Sovereignty, vol. i. p. 202. 
2 Colossians i. 15. 


108 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


and aim of all history ; as the manifested 
and spoken Logos, He is the consummate 
flower, yet the Lord of the process, the 
reason of the movements by which He 
came. He, the Reason of every law and 
force, has come out into manifestation, 
travelling in the chariot of every force and 
along the avenue of every law, and being 
now Incarnate, flashes back through their 
mysteriousness the illumination of Himself, 
making them clear and radiant. He is the 
spirit, the informing and authoritative 
Fact of all laws, for He is Love; and law 
is only Love's order. He includes in his 
Person a!l laws, for Love is the all-inclu- 
sive law, —a law unto itself. Is not this 
the desideratum of all philosophy? Does 
not this Mediation in Him between finite 
and infinite, between absolute and relative, 
furnish thought with its initiative and goal ? 
Is it not to answer the fundamental ques- 
tions, to find the Reason for things as they 
are, and to see that this Reason, which was 
so satisfactory at the beginning that things 


The Transfigured Christ. 109 


became, is yet their Reason; that this 
Personal Reason of the universe is its 
motive power, its goal, its glory? As this 
Fact, comes the Incarnate Logos with His 
transfiguration. 

Occupying this position, every view of 
nature which denies what is called the 
supernatural is curiously inadequate and 
unphilosophical. Some such position as 
that held by the Christian student of the 
transfiguration seems a necessity. Natu- 
ralism becomes inefficient to deal satis- 
factorily with many facts which have a 
far-away and yet sure harmony with what 
is seen in Jesus Christ. There the Chris- 
tian thinker grounds \his “ supernatural 
naturalism,” and sees about him a strange 
sympathy. The realism which has been 
atheistic, now, in most unexpected quarters, 
looks toward idealism, which is panthe- 
istic. The next birth-pang for the ulti- 
mate philosophy will be the passing through 
this impending discussion. Afar, it may 
be, but certain is the triumph of ideal- 


110 ~The Transfiguration of Christ. 


realism, in this “ Ratio et Verbum,” this Lo- 
gos, with its Christian theism granting the 
vision of God in Christ. It is obviously 
an incomplete account of matter and force 
which leaves out such a scene; and Phi- 
losophy has written her death-warrant un- 
less she willingly and gladly follows out 
the evident movements of force in matter, 
the certain modifications of which matter is 
the subject, which, “far beyond the ooze 
and slime,” so leap with the infinite motive 
power within them, and glow with the 
eternal and changeless reason, which, in 
the silence of some remote past, augured 
their existence and destiny. Christian 
philosophy enthrones the Logos, the 
Christ, as this Motive Power and Rea- 
son. 

John did not feel that the glory of the 
Logos on Hermon was out of harmony 
with His nature and with the nature of the 
universe as seen in the light of Him. If, 
as seems John’s idea, this Logos was and 
now is the organ and medium of creation, 


The Transfigured Christ. 11 


then creation has no law broken, as He 
flashes forth His interior glory : nay, rather 
is the orderly process of nature illumined 
and justified, as its ancient Reason stands 
with it, upon it, having come to claim His 
own. Doubtless John’s thoughts took a 
quite different direction from ours. It was 
a personal, concrete, and spiritual problem 
to him, while every such event as the 
transfiguration offers to our time an intel- 
lectual, abstract, impersonal problem. But 
John’s conception of Jesus is as great as 
the soul. If we are right in the belief that 
we are to find the settlement of intellect- 
ual problems in spiritual truth, surely there 
is light for every questioning mind here. 
John is not alone in such a conception 
of Jesus as makes Him unique, after this 
manner, in the universe. Paul's most pro- 
found students have found this same phi- 
losophy of things in his first letter to the 
Corinthians. ‘“ The absolute, universal 
mediation of the Son is declared as unre- 
servedly from: the first epistle to the 


112 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Corinthians,” says Bishop Lightfoot, “as 
in any later statement of the Apostle.” ? 
It will be observed that this mediatorial 
function is as indispensable in the history 
of matter as in the history of the soul ; 
and whatever Jesus Christ is to the human 
soul or to the physical world, as Mediator, 
He is because He is the Logos. As Mar- 
tensen urges: “ As Mediator between the 
Father and the world, it appertains to the 
essence of the Son not only to have His 
life in the Father, but to live also in the 
world. As ‘the heart of God the Father,’ 
He is at the same time ‘the eternal heart 
of the world,’ through which the divine 
life streams into creation. As the Lagos 
of the Father, He is at the same time the 
Logos of the world, through whom the 
divine life shines into creation.” 2 There 
is this deep unity of teaching in the 
analytic and argumentative Paul and the 
mystic, intuitive John. Remarking upon 
1 Lightfoot on Colossians, p. 122. 
2 Christian Dogmatics, p. 189. 


The Transfigured Christ. 113 


Paul’s fine perception of this truth in the 
phrase “es airov,” Col. i. 15, 17, Light- 
foot says: “All things must find their 
meeting point in Him from whom they 
took their rise, in the Word as the 
Mediatorial agent, and through the Word 
in the Father.” God is His own reason, 
as manifested in Christ. When we ask 
for the reason of things, we see it must 
not, cannot, be outside of God’s own na- 
ture, and that it is the unuttered Lagos. 
When that Zogos is uttered in the Incar- 
nation, then He testifies of Himself: “He 
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” } 
“The Word,” adds the Bishop of Durham, 
“is the final goal as well as the Creative 
agent of the universe,. .. the goal... 
as He was the starting-point.” “As all 
creation passed out from Him, so does it 
all converge again toward Him. Heis not 
only the ‘apy, but also the réAos of crea- 
tion.” “In Him,” says Paul to the Colos- 
sians, “ were all things created, and by Him 


1 John xiv. 9. 


114. ‘The Transfiguration of Christ. 


all things consist.” 1 Each of these Apos- 
tles has a philosophy of things whose 
vision comprehends a Christocentric uni- 
verse. 

Now let us apply all this to the problem 
of the transfiguration, and what a natural 
thing it was! Peter, James, and John had 
been the recipients of a special culture. 
Once before they had been with Him, — 
with this Living Centre of universal law 
and force whose name was Love, who thus 
made the motions and energies obedient 
to Love’s dominion and triumphs, — where 
the darkest phase of the problem of the 
universe confronted them and Him. It 
wore only a less terrible visage then, at 
the side of the dead body of the daughter 
of Jairus,? than here, when He had per- 
sisted all the way to Hermon in announce 
ing to them His own death. It must be 
noted that these three times in which 
Jesus vouchsafed to these three disciples 
His special culture— namely, the raising 


1 Colossians i. 15. 2 Luke viii. 41. 


The Transfigured Christ. 115 


of the daughter of Jairus, the transfigura- 
tion, and the scene in dark Gethsemane — 
were but three steps in discovery, three 
lessons on the same theme. That theme 
was the Invisible Kingship of Himself in 
this invisible kingdom, which also was the 
kingdom of the Invisible. At the bedside 
where the little girl lay dead, the physical 
was supreme, the natural had its confessed 
victory over the spiritual. But at the ap- 
proach of this living Centre of all laws, 
this Force from whom and to whom are 
all forces, a new factor came into the 
equation ; and, because that factor was 
Incarnate Love, the all-inclusive Law, the 
Authority and Power Supreme, the result 
was changed. The law of death opened 
into the larger law of life: there was no 
infraction ; but the dead lived. “ She ts 
not dead, but sleepeth.’ In the all-encir- 
cling presence of Life there is no death. 
The Logos which was the Reason of all 
Law was there and was supreme. So har- 
monious was this new “Order” with the 


116 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


old order of nature that, into the wonder 
and mystery which followed the raising of 
the maid from the dead, He inserted the 
plain and realistic words: “ Give the child 
some food.” The touch of the higher — 
yea, of the Highest — Law, which was 
Love, had opened the way for the min- 
istry of the lower; and what we call the 
supernaturalism of raising the child was so 
natural that the next thing after the mir- 
acle was the demand for physical nutri- 
ment. The Lagos is the Law of all laws; 
in Christ Jesus, the lowest is harmonious 
with the highest. 

Now, at the moment of His transfigura- 
tion, Peter, James, and John, after days of 
long misunderstanding of what this un- 
. seen kingdom and this kingdom of the 
unseen meant, were again in the pres- 
ence of the Unseen King. A new phase 
of His work was here to be begun. Says 
Godet : ‘This moment marks the apogee 
of the public ministry of Jesus, and, if we 
may venture to say it, the point of tran- 


The Transfigured Christ. 117 


sition from action to passion. A royal 
pathway had been originally opened to 
Him: it led through temptation and moral 
progress from innocence to holiness, — this 
was the first stage of the journey; then 
through a glorious transformation, physical 
and spiritual, from holiness to glory... . 
Jesus had reached that point of His exist- 
ence when, according to the royal law, of 
which we have been speaking, He was to 
raise Himself by means of a transforma- 
tion out of the form of existence which 
belongs to earth into the heavenly state. 
The transfiguration was the first step in 
this glorious ascent. That light which from 
His inner being, illumined from above, ir- 
radiates His body and makes even His very 
raiment to glister is the beginning of His 
glorification. These two messengers from 
a higher world, who present themselves to 
Him, are ambassadors come to meet Him 
and to introduce Him into the heavenly 
habitations. Lastly, that cloud, mysterious 
emblem of the Father’s presence, is, as it 


118 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


were, the chariot in which the Holy One 
and the Just is to ascend into the world of 
glory. But what happens now? The light 
disappears ; the heavenly messengers van- 
ish; the cloud is withdrawn. Jesus re- 
mains ; He is seen amongst his disciples 
the same as before ; and soon, as if nothing 
had happened, He comes down the moun- 
tain with his disciples, who had been wit- 
nesses of the scene. .. . Jesus had it in 
His power to accept this triumphant de- 
parture ; and it was right that God should 
offer it to Him, for it was the reward due 
to His holiness. But in thus reéntering 
heaven, Jesus must have entered it alone. 
.. . Humanity unreconciled would have 
remained on earth struggling with the 
bonds of sin and death until its entire dis- 
solution. ... After having fulfilled the 
task set before the innocent man, —that of 
becoming the holy man, perfect in all re- 
spects, — Jesus, on the point of laying His 
hand on the crown which was the reward 
due His victorious course, turns away from 


The Transfigured Christ. 119 


it, because He sees before Him another 
task, a final work indispensable for Him, if 
it is His purpose to ascend not alone, but 
followed by a great company,—the re- 
habilitation of fallen humanity.” 1 

That at the transfiguration of Christ is 
preached a gospel which includes “the re- 
habilitation of humanity” no one can doubt. 
Rejecting whatever we may of the inci- 
dental material of Professor Godet’s sug- 
gestive exposition, we must agree that the 
fact that the “ Lamb of God” came into 
the world “to take away the sins of the 
world” includes and makes necessary the 
fact of His glorification, beginning on Her- 
mon, triumphant at the grave of Joseph, 
and so complete in its transformation of 
His physical self that, on the day of ascen- 
sion, earth and heaven are one; His sacred 
feet, so long homeless and once so cruelly 
scarred, miss the rocks of Olivet, and soon 
Jesus is at home again, the enthroned 
Logos on the right hand of God the 


1 Studies in the New Testament, p. 111, 


120 =©The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Father. The atonement involves all these 
steps and processes. It is the reconcilia- 
tion of all that is human to the divine. 
Man is not pure spirit alone. The hu- 
man personality is not redeemed by forces 
which simply recreate a new life in the 
soul. Such a life within as gives a pledge 
to the “body of our humiliation” every 
sound theology must offer as the complete 
salvation in Christ. Any real illumination 
of man in the transfiguration must illu- 
mine both mind and matter; and, in the 
splendor of such an event in the history of 
man as the shining face of that great Gal- 
ilean, there are many suggestions which 
penetrate and glorify the far-off future of 
both. Jesus Christ was the Divine Self- 
revelation ; He was also the revelation of 
man under God,—the illustrator of the 
possibilities of humanity in Him. “The 
glory which Thou hast given unto Me 
I have given unto them.” The factor in 
the outworking of this glory with which 
we have to do is His holiness, — ever 


The Transfigured Christ. 121 


above us, yet vouchsafed unto us by grace. 
It was His power, personal and resistless, 
In Him, through Him, it is ours, — this 
same personal loving harmony with the 
genius of things, with God. When the 
soul falls in love with Love, with Christ, it 
has bound itself to the Lagos, the Reason 
of things. What, by His nature, He was 
in the beginning with God, we, through 
Him, obtain by grace. His transfigura- 
tion was thus, at once, the achievement of 
His holiness and a natural event in His 
life in His own universe. Something of 
its peculiar radiance belongs to any human 
being who begins and completes his holi- 
ness —in body, soul, and spirit—in the 
holiness of Christ Jesus. His power in 
prayer there is repeated in the prayer of 
every man and woman, who, going on to- 
ward some cross of self-sacrifice, stops on 
Hermon. One power alone is resistless 
with the Supreme Holiness, and that is 
holiness. Because that power is holiness 
— loving loyalty unto and harmony with 


122 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


the Ruler of things through the mani- 
fested Logos, the plan and idea of things 
— there is no infraction of law. 
“The old order changeth, 
Giving place to new.” 

But there is an “order” in the “change,” 
a law by which the ministry of the old 
passes over and up into the ministry of the 
new. His transfiguration and our trans- 
figuration of body, soul, and spirit are of 
this “new order.” 

Christ Jesus began on Hermon, in Him- 
self, the rehabilitation of man. There 


1 In his Gospel of the Resurrection (p. 179), Canon 
Westcott shows with great force the personal and moral 
significance of the resurrection of the body. He says: 
“The noblest of the ancient moralists looked upon 
man’s body as a hopeless burden and fatal hindrance to 
the soul, and in this they have been followed by the 
noblest non-Christian moralists in every age. The 
famous thanksgiving of Plotinus that he ‘ was not tied to 
an immortal body’ expresses the common feeling of all 
who have not felt the power of the resurrection. But 
Christianity transfigures what philosophy would destroy. 
It shows that the corruption by which we are weighed 
down does not belong to our proper nature, and is not 


The Transfigured Christ. 123 


full redemption began to appear. Human- 
ity saw Him as its “Living Head.” Life 


necessarily bound up with it forever. It lays open with 
a deeper and more searching criticism than a system of 
morality could direct the internal struggles to which the 
‘flesh’ must give occasion and the inevitable defeats 
which we must suffer in our efforts toward the divine 
life. Plato does not describe more sadly than St. Paul 
the afflictions by which we are beset while yet oppressed 
by ‘the body of humiliation’ (Phil. iii. 21). Or, to take 
an example from a different sect and age, M. Aurelius 
does not express more keenly than St. John a sense of 
the evils of the present life. But there is an immeasur- 
able chasm between the Apostles and Platonists or 
Stoics. ‘ We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being 
burdened,’ St. Paul writes, ‘not for that we would be 
unclothed but clothed upon, that mortality might be 
swallowed up by life’ (2 Cor. v. 4). The better change 
for which he longed was not the destruction but the en- 
nobling of his body, so that it might ‘be fashioned like 
unto Christ’s body of glory, according to the working 
whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Him- 
self. And the power by which this transformation 
should be effected was the simple contemplation of 
Christ in His essential majesty. Nay, in some sense, 
the change is already begun on earth, so far as that we 
can look forward with full hope to its accomplishment ; 
for ‘ we all with open face beholding as in a glass the 
glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image 


124 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


is transfigured, if the transfigured One is 
Saviour and Lord of the whole being. Not 
alone in the resurrection, but in this earlier 
event of transformation, which is the glo- 
rification in Christ of man’s earthly life, 
are our “bodies members of Christ.” } 
“From glory unto glory,’—this is the 
line of advance and its method. “This 
corruptible must put on incorruption, this 
mortal must put on immortality,” — first, 
in the transfiguration of our whole life 
there must begin the process, which com- 
pletes itself when the graves open. Our 
physical life lays hold of its redemption 
through the life of Christ in us. We are 
not to be “‘ wnclothed, but clothed upon, that 
mortality might be swallowed up of life.” 
Thus begins the redemption of the body 
from glory to glory’ (2 Cor. iii. 18). ‘ Beloved, now are 
we the sons of God:’ such are St. John’s words. ‘And 
it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know 
that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for 
we shall see Him as He is’” (1 John iii. 2). 
1 x Cor. vi. 15. 


2 See last lecture, on “The Transfiguration and the 
Resurrection,” 


The Transfigured Christ. 125 


The transfiguration of the human body 
of Jesus Christ was thus an event in which 
all creation had a definite and unique il- 
lumination. Its whole past was lit up and 
at least partially explained. With possi- 
bilities in Christ, as the Zogos of creation, 
such as these, every fartherest atom had 
quivered and advanced from the begin- 
ning. All natural forces were striving 
with high energy to this and the greater 
events beyond it.! He, in that hour of 
glory, was sending back upon the dark 
abysses of the groaning creation a gleam 
of the radiance which interpreted, as it 
penetrated, the long agony. “All crea- 
tion,” says Dean Alford, in his exposition 
of Paul to the Ephesians, — “all creation 
is summed up in Christ.”2 All laws of 


1 “To the very important thought that the God-man, 
Jesus Christ, is not merely a means of humanity, that is 
for the work of redemption in particular, but is also an 
end in Himself served by the entire world, too little im- 
portance has frequently been attached.” — Dorner, Per- 
son of Christ, vol. iv. p. 332- 

2 Note on Ephesians i. 10, 11. 


126 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


nature, with its pain and sin and death, 
all laws of grace, with its peace and holi- 
ness and life, rise into the law of love, in 
Him. Here, He only carries into the 
loftier jurisdiction of His personal life the 
laws and processes which lie in the burst- 
ing seed and the falling star. 
“‘The earth is crammed with heaven, 

And every common bush afire with God.” 
In the Christ was the point where that 
flame quivered for a moment; and Nature 
confessed in His transfiguration her kin- 
ship with the supernatural. In His pres- 
ence, the highest dreams of poet and seer 
repeat again their musings : — 

“What if all animated natures 

Be but organic harps, diversely framed, 


That tremble into life as o’er them sweeps 
One intellectual breeze ?” 


Let us embrace, then, the large faith 
which feeds upon this splendid scene. 
Jesus transfigured is the transfiguration of 
the whole universe. Let us take up the 
strain of apostle and saint, and teach it to 


The Transfigured Christ. 127 


our philosophy, — “that at the name of 
Jesus every knee should bow, of things in 
heaven and things on the earth and things 
under the earth; and that every tongue 
should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, 
to the glory of the Father.! “The first 
born before all creation” is “Heir of all 
things ;” and God “hath put all things 
under His feet.” The destiny of this 
spurned and blasted planet is bound up 
with the destiny of the life in Christ. 
The Logos attaches every nook and cranny 
of the universe to Himself. ‘For it is 
the good pleasure of the Father that in 
Him should all fulness dwell, and through 
Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, 
having made peace through the blood of 
His cross; through Him, I say, whether 
things upon the earth or things in the 
heavens.” 2 

To a larger study of this “ reconcilia- 
tion” we must address ourselves, as the 


1 Phil. ii. To. 2 Colossians i. 19. 


128 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


fact of evil and its results grow more 
plain in the presence of the Law and the 
Prophets, — Moses and Elias, who “ap- 
peared in glory and talked with Him.” 





LECTURE V. 
ye Appearance of Moses. 








a as 


The Appearance of Moses. 


“And, behold, there talked with Him two men, which were 
Moses and Elias, who appeared in glory, and spake of His decease 
which He should accomplish at Jerusalem. But Peter and they 
that were with Him were heavy with sleep: and when they were 
awake, they saw His glory, and the two men that stood with Him. 
And it came to pass, as they departed from Him, Peter said unto 
Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: let us build three taber- 
nacles; one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not 
knowing what he said. While he thus spake, there came a cloud 
and overshadowed them, and they feared as they entered into the 
cloud. And there came a voice out of the cloud: saying, This is my 
beloved Son, hear Him. And when the voice was past, Jesus was 
found alone.’’ — LuKE ix. 30-36. 


AICHAEL ANGELO has been 
surpassed by the strong chisel- 





ing of the human soul as it has 
written history and determined the chief 
forces of civilization. In a niche far more 
proportionately prominent than that in 
any fane of art and religion, has the his- 
toric spirit placed the Moses which it has 


132 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


brought forth from its partial imprison- 
ment in the past. As new lands of Canaan 
open before man’s eager eye, and other 
Jordans are crossed by his resolute feet, 
he is impressed with the ioftiness of that 
early leadership and the sublimity of that 
unknown grave. No figure of the early 
times is more surely rising out of the 
mists of antiquity and assuming his true 
place in the annals of his race than is 
Moses, the lawgiver of Israel and the ben- 
efactor of mankind. The splendor of that 
burning bush flashes in the night of every 
modern gloom, and the face of which he 
wist not that it shone? looks out from 
the morning hours of a new day. Says 
Lowell : — 
“ Never to see a nation born 
Hath been given to mortal man, 

Unless to those who on that summer morn 

Gazed silent when the great Virginian 

Unsheathed his sword, whose fatal flash 


Shot union into the incoherent clash 
Of our loose atoms, crystallizing them 


1 Exodus xxxiv. 29. 


The Appearance of Moses. 133 


Around a single will’s unpliant stem, 
And making purpose of emotion rash.”1 

Add to the glory of Washington the 
fact that Moses’ rod had no historic prec- 
edent, that yet it transformed into a new 
nationality a mighty mass of slaves, and 
“around that single will’s unpliant stem ” 
gathered from a host of wanderers a com- 
monwealth whose law and religion were 
one, and something of this personal force 
in the history of human society is under- 
stood. The farewell address of Washing- 
ton has but a more local application to the 
world of to-day; for the nations of earth 
read those last words of the great leader 
of Israel, and feel a certainty of govern- 
ment in God, as this statesman ascends 
Nebo, saying, “‘ Zhe eternal God ts thy ref- 
uge, and underneath ave the everlasting 
arms.” The solution of problems, which, 
on superficial inquiry, must seem to have 
been beyond the reach of his influence, is 
seen to lie close to the idea with which he 


1 “Under the Great Elm.” 


134 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


forsook an Egyptian court, and to have its 
root in that conception of the government 
of God which sustained his soul in the 
moment when Israel was in mutiny. The 
word of his time was Jaw; the word of 
ours is /éberty; but as the self-governing 
soul manifests its half-understood free- 
dom in the flush of ardent youth, it finds 
no liberty which does not fulfill law, and 
none valuable which will not submit to its 
regulation. A deep Christian philosophy, 
instead of deposing this mighty Jew and 
tearing his achievements from its sacred 
books, recognizes the providence of his- 
tory, first at Sinai, and then at Calvary ; 
and assures the mind that there can be 
but a partial understanding of the new 
song of the redeemed without some knowl- 
edge of the song of Miriam at the sea- 
side. So identical are the meeting-points 
of the forces of human redemption that, 
from the Isle of Patmos, one who was 
gifted with the inclusive vision of a seer 
saw the inhabitants of heaven singing 
“the song of Moses and the Lamb.” 


The Appearance of Moses. 135 


Living yet amid the regnant influences 
of progress, it is significant that. George 
Eliot, the poetess of much that makes our 
time too halting and infirm to follow his 
steps, should see the meanings that start 
from the grave of Moses. 


“But Israel waited, looking toward the Mount, 
Till with the deepening eve the elders came, 
Saying : ‘ His burial is hid with God: 
We stood far off and saw the Angels lift 
His corpse aloft until they seemed a star 
That burnt itself away within the sky.’ 
The people answered with mute orphaned gaze, 
Looking for what had vanished evermore. 
Then through the gloom without them and within 
The spirits shaping light, mysterious speech, 
Invisible Will wrought clear in sculptured sound, 
The thought-begotten daughter of the voice 
Thrilled on their listening sense : ‘ He has no tomb. 
He dwells not with you dead, but lives as Law.’”2 


Such words are but the testimony of the 
modern spirit to the truth that Moses 
stands, in the annals of men, not only for 
that code of Sinai, but that, in his career 
and in his attitude toward the destinies of 

1 “The Death of Moses,” Poctical Works, p. 261. 


> 


136 ©The Transfiguration of Christ. 


mankind, there were gathered up the scat- 
tered meanings of this “Invisible Will” 
as it moves in the Universe, and that there 
came from out the fire of his soul a concep- 
tion of the nature and majesty of law which 
has shone through dolorous and lawless 
centuries into the age in which we live. 
He made the idea of law the possession of 
religion, and religion has invested this idea 
with her eternal sanctities.1 He has asso- 
ciated law with the Supreme Power of the 
universe so vitally that the awful grandeur 
of Sinai and the no less impressive sub- 
limity of his silent guardianship seem but 
natural in the career of a soul whose priv- 
ilege it was to entertain so important a 
message. “He endured,” says Paul, “as 
seeing Him who is invisible.” 2 Law was 
the avenue along which traveled the swift 
feet of the Infinite Will ; and although hav- 
ing but an incomplete vision of a single 
route along which the Infinite swept — 


1 Michaelis, Zaws of Moses, vol. i. p. 66. 
2 Hebrews xi. 27. 


The Appearance of Moses. 137 


the law of conduct —he had such an in- 
sight into that, that congenial minds have 
been led into a more easy discovery of 
those highways, parting here and meet- 
ing there, by which Omnipotence reaches 
every point in the universe. Moses stands 
for all these laws, since they all meet and 
cross in the realm of conduct, whose law- 
giver he was. All roads ran to Rome, 
and all laws run into the life of man, — 

“Since God collected and resumed in man 

The firmaments, the strata and the lights, 

Fish, fowl and beast, and insect —all their trains 

Of various life caught back upon His arm 

Reorganized and constituted Man 

The Microcosm, the adding up of works, 
“ Microcosm” that Man is, he repeats the 
history of the universe. He has the expe- 
rience of unconscious ages in a thought. 
He has to do with the laws of the life 
below him ; for the visible universe hides 
its problem in his skull, and thither the 
laws tend, meeting in the law of his life.? 


1 Mrs. Browning. 
2 Vancotta, Zhe Development-Law of the Earth, The 


138 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


When St. Paul says, of the law of Moses, 
“the law was our schoolmaster,’ he states 
what is true of all law. Its work is the 
work of education. Man is created for 
a self-determining life, and the worth of 
law is that it puts man beyond itself, by 
making him fit for self-determination.? 
The laws of nature not only hold the visi- 
ble universe in orderly unity, but are the 
perpetual revelation, to a docile mind, of 
the character and method of the supreme 
Power. The laws of human history are a 
ceaseless school, and offera culture wideas 
man’s life. The laws of God everywhere 
are loaded with benefit, which enters into 
personality by obedience. If they accom- 
plish their full end, their personality be- 
comes so strong that obedience is forgotten 
in the free alliance of the nature with the 
power behind the law, whose method of 
action it is. Mosaism is an illustration of 


Supernatural in Nature, p. 184. Haeckel, The History 
of Creation. 

1 Galatians iii. 24, 25. 

2 Macgregor on Galatians, zm /oc. 


The Appearance of Moses. 139 


this educative influence inlaw.! In the as- 
sertion that this is the real aim of law can 
be seen both the power and incomplete- 
ness of the law of Israel.2 It needs not 
that any exhaustive list of texts be offered 
that we may see how plainly these are set 
forth in the early writings of Christianity. 
In heathenism itself, it has been found 
that law alone could not comprehend the 
life of man. The broken law and the law- 
breaker — these have been _ problems 
which the existence and power of law alone 
could not handle. When the law has 
been broken, and the personality it was 
meant to serve has become disobedient, 
it has no power to make the weakness of 
disobedience over into the power to obey, 
nor to kindle a love of obedience. The 


1 Russell Martineau, Zhe Roots of Christianity in 
Mosaism. Luckock, The Tables oj Stone, p. 43- 

2 Leathes, Foundations of Morality, p. 16. Smith, 
Characteristics of Christian Morality, p. 29. 

8 Cocker, Christianity and Greek Philosophy. 
Leathes, Zhe Religion of Christ, Lecture 1. Martensen, 
Christian Ethics, vo}. i. sec. 8, 


140 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


law of Moses was “added because of 
transgressions.” 1 Jt could restrain evil ; 
it could not help up the evil-doer who had 
fallen. It was a power to save, when 
obeyed, and even then its end was to be 
outgrown by the personality which it built 
up. “ The law was a schoolmaster,” says 
Paul, “to bring us to Christ.”* What a 
scholarship it gave to the world! All that 
can ever follow will not make obedience less 
fundamental to the development of char- 
acter ; and this was its earliest gift to the 
race. Those precepts could not but put 
the mind of men in the attitude for princi- 
ples; those services of the temple and that 
careful performance of small and incomplete 
duties were an education which the world 
was not to forget. But it would be a 
wasted culture without Christ. Its value 
lies in the fact that it brought the world 
to “Christ that we might be justified by 
Saith.” Then it ends: “ After that faith is 
come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.” 


1 Galatians iii. 17 ; Joshua xv. 22, 


2 Galatians iii. 24, 25. 


The Appearance of Moses. 141 


The appearance of the great lawgiver 
in the glory of Christ’s transfiguration has, 
then, this significance,—the law has 
brought the world to Christ. In the glory 
of Christ, Moses had a right to stand. It 
has also the significance that Moses as the 
giver of the law has yielded now to this 
new lawgiver, Jesus, the Christ of God. 
It was not Christ standing in the neighbor- 
hood of the glory of Moses, but Moses 
standing in the presence of the transfig- 
ured Christ. Jesus left the words “/ am 
come not to destroy, but to fulfill”) as the es- 
timate, by the Christ, of these laws ; and in 
His treatment of Mosaic legislation, as we 
shall see, He gave to Moses an indefeasible 
right to be the heavenly companion of His 
transfigured hour. But, also, Jesus made 
plain the fact that the era of law, as the 
supreme element in man’s progress, was 
done, and that henceforth the law of liberty 
and the law of love should rule the souls 
of men. These two facts will appear, as 


1 Matthew v. 17. 


142 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


we note the fundamental difference in the 
revelations through Moses and Jesus Christ. 

In Moses, man has a revelation of the 
method of God ; in Jesus Christ a revela- 
tion of the nature —a manifestation of the 
very self —of God. The nature of Moses 
could come only so near to God as to find 
His method; the nature of Jesus Christ 
was so divine as to reveal Him — the Naz- 
arene was “the express image of His per- 
son.’ 1 Thus, the proclamation of the lips 
and life of Moses is: “God zs Law;” the rev- 
elation of Jesus Christ is: “ God zs Love.” ? 
Law is the method of love. The laws of 
nature and of the soul are the methods of 
operation which Love, by its inherent 
orderliness, uses to unify existence and 
to save the universe from ill-fated and 
destructive chaos, unto a constructive and 
beneficent cosmos, and to realize at last 
in conscious completeness its self in the 
destiny of man. Robert Browning has 


1 Hebrews i. 3; 1 Corinthians iv. 4; Colossians i. 15. 
2 1 John iy. 8. 


The Appearance of Moses. 143 


seen deeply into the somewhat indivisible 
alliance of essence and method in God and 
in His revelation in nature: — 
“T spoke as I saw. 

Ireport, as man may of God’s work — a//’s Love, yet all’s 

Law. 
Now I lay down the judgeship He sent me. Each fac- 

ulty tasked, 
To perceive Him, has gained an abyss where a dewdrop 

was asked.” 
And nothing more certainly indicates the 
intelligent hold which this seer has on the 
truth as it is in Jesus than the influence 
which this profound conception has with 
him, in the domain of ethics. It is true 
that, in God’s nature and His revelation in 
history, the method of God is so allied and 
contemporaneous with His essence that all 
not only seems but is both Love and Law. 
And it is certain that Love is the essential 
element of which Law isthe method. The 
duty of the human soul is to be unsatisfied 
with enforced or unintelligent obedience 
of Law, and to rest not until it enters into 
the very life of the personal Force behind, 


144 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


and in all law. Thus shall it find in God 
rootage for its own true and real life, so 
that afterward its own being shall feed 
upon a deeper life, paternal and everlast- 
ing. Then, from within every chamber of 
its inmost being, the energy of that soul 
shall go out sympathetically and harmoni- 
ously with these laws. No longer are they 
restraining powers, but a part of its own 
natural method of existence, because of its 
affectionate alliance with the Love of which 
they are the order. To do this is not only 
a duty, but man’s privilege through the In- 
carnation of God in Christ. God zs Love. 
In Jesus of Nazareth, Love is so human that 
it charms and commands the remnant of 
the divine within us—ourlove. “ And J,” 
said the Christ, “2f J be lifted up from the 
earth, will draw all men unto me.” By the 
acceptance of Christ, we do accept God ; 
and by the might of Christ’s influence, we 
find ourselves “ hid with Christ in God.” * 
Thus, out of the divine nature, in which 


1 John xii. 32. 2 Colossians iii. 3. 


The Appearance of Moses. 145 


the’ soul is rooted, in Christ, does its 
law of love come. Christ is a law unto 
Himself, because He, with the Father, is 
Love ; and Love is its own law. In Him 
the soul falls in love with Love, and thus 
finds its true self ; and it finds also that it is 
a law unto itself, since Love has assumed 
the throne. God-like it is for the first time, 
for it is self-centred; manly for the first 
time, since it feels that it was made for this. 
The schoolmaster’s work is done. It has 
come to Christ. Law is lost in Love. 
And yet, as always in Christ’s transfig- 
ured hours, Moses is present. In the light 
of this experience, it can understand him. 
Moses is fulfilled in Christ, because not 
only does the soul feel the /aw of love, but, 
for the first time, it feels the Jove of law. 


“ Life, with all it yields of joy and woe 
And hope and fear, — believe the aged friend, — 
Is just our chance o the prize of learning love, 


How love might be, hath been indeed, and is ; 
1 2 Corinthians v. 14; Romans xiii. 10; Galatians 
v. 13; I John iii. 1; iv. 7; viii. 16; Ephesians v. 2; 
John xiii. 34. 


146 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost 
Such prize, despite the envy of the world, 
And having gained truth keep truth ; that is all.” 


But into the midst of this “ chance o’ the 
prize of learning love,” by the slow wan- 
derings in life’s desert, even under the com- 
mand of Moses, Christ comes; and God, 
who in Moses educates men by the revela- 
tion of His method, now, through the In- 
carnation, offers Himself. The days of te- 
dious “learning” are omitted, in one touch 
of the eternal Christ. So that the entire 
gift of Christianity to man is Christ. Love 
is lovable, in this most lovely manifestation 
of its very self. The soul does not resist 
its appeal to the power of love that it has. 
Jesus is the appeal of God’s nature to the 
God-like within us. In the loving brother, 
the fatherhood of God so persuades the 
latent sonship of the human soul into ut- 
terance, that we are no longer creatures, 
but sons, and cry: “Adda, Father.”? 

1 Browning, A Death in the Desert. 


2 John v.17; Actsi. 4; John xiv. 20; Matt. xxiii. 9; 
John xx.7 ; Mark xiv. 36. 


The Appearance of Moses. 147 


Christianity is as eternal as the soul. It 
is the love of Love. Every element of life 
that lifts the soul to that self-centred life, 
it takes up and fulfills. All morality is 
thus more than “touched with emotion ;” 
it is transformed; and, in hours when 
Jesus is transfigured in some human soul, 
it comes from its home, and, like Moses, 
is seen in the light of something far more 
divine, which is its fulfillment. 


“ They talk of morals, O thou bleeding Lamb! 
The true morality is love of Thee.” 


As Love, in the Incarnation, did complete 
Law, and in the nature of God must ever 
give it its fullness, so in the real life of a 
man, the life in which he partakes of God 
in Christ, “ove,” and love alone, “zs the 
Sulfilling of the law.” 1! The power returns, 
at last, to its Source. Christ breaks down 
the legalism of the soul, by the develop- 
ment within it of the affectionate alliance 
which in all high moments every good man 
feels with the divine order. 


1 Romans xiii. Io. 


148 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


“The very God! think, Abib, dost thou think? 

So the All-Great were the All-Loving too ; 

So through the thunder comes a human voice 
Saying, ‘O heart I made, a heart beats here! 

Face my hands fashioned, see it in Myself ; 

Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of Mine, 
But Love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 

And thou must love Me who have died for thee.’”? 


And it is this law of love which is thus, 
because in his essential nature man is a 
child of God, the law of liberty,” to every 
soul which has found its sonship unto the 
Father, in our elder brother, Jesus the 
Christ. In Christ Jesus, not only do the 
affections throb in sympathy with law as 
seen in Love’s manifestation, but the will, 
in that sublime instant of experience, be- 
comes, for the first time, self-determining 
in the life, because it allies itself with the 
will of heaven, and its empire is as sure as 
that of God. It wields the omnipotency 
of Love by the fact that having willingly 
submitted to Love, the method of Love is 


1 Browning, vol. iii. p. 226. 
2 James i. 25; ii. 12. 


The Appearance of Moses. 149 


its method. This method is its law. It 
is not a law of restraint any more. As 
the law of love insures the love of law, so, 
and for the same reason, the law of liberty 
insures the liberty of law. “ Where the 
spirit of the Lord ts, there ts liberty ;”? and 
there is also law. Moses is fulfilled in 
Christ. And, as in this light of transfigu- 
ration we note the appearance of the great 
lawgiver, we must be impressed with the 
deep alliance, which our age seems not to 
have felt, of that real freedom, after which 
all else is vague yearning, with the govern- 
ment of God. 

Never does the government of the Al- 
mighty seem to disclose its throne so nearly 
as when, in Jesus Christ, Law recedes into 
Love. Christ Himself, in the moment of 
this revelation, is a sacrifice. For the law- 
lessness of earth, He substitutes the infi- 


1 Wiitke, Christian Ethics, Lacroix’s Translation, 
vol. i. p. 241. 

2 2 Corinthians iii. 17; Romans viii. 21; Galatians 
ve L 


150 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


nite Love behind and within all law. In 
Love’s wounded side, the law is made in- 
tact. But there is something else to do. 
To stop there would be to leave the world 
with Moses. In this very act, Love so re- 
veals His loveliness, and hence the loveli- 
ness of law, that the still living embers of 
the God-like in a sinful soul —the powers 
of love beneath all the hate of sin — are so 
inspired that they glow, and, delivered from 
the love of sin, as well as from its guilt, it 
sees and feels itself saved to God in Christ, 
— saved, with an honored Jaw, to Love, by 
love. 

So “ there is, therefore, now no condemna- 
tion to them which ave in Christ Fesus. 
For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Fe- 
sus hath made me free from the law of sin 
and death.’ Moses appeared at the trans- 
figuration of Christ, because “the daw was 
our schoolmaster.’ He disappeared, be- 
cause it had brought us “to Christ.” How 
clearly did Paul understand this! The 


1 Romans viii. §. 


The Appearance of Moses. 151 


record of the old was sacred to him. 
“And it came to pass, when Moses came 
down from Mount Sinai with the two tables 
of testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came 
down from the mount, that Moses wist not 
that the skin of his face shone while he talked 
with Him.’' The record of the new was 
still more sacred ; its story of transfigu- 
ration yet more sublime. “ Suz,” says Paul, 
“af the ministration of death, written and 
engraven in stones, was glorious, so that 
the children of Israel could not stedfastly 
behold the face of Moses, for the glory of his 
countenance; which glory was to be done 
away ; how shall not the ministration of 
the spirit be rather glorious.” ? 

The heavenly visitant was not silent. 
With Elias, he conversed with the trans- 
figured Christ. The theme of their con- 
versation was “the decease which He should 
accomplish at Ferusalem.” Fifteen cen- 
turies of celestial life had revealed to the 


1 Exodus xxxiv. 29. 
2 2 Corinthians iii. 7, 8. 


152 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


old lawgiver a significant event lying in 
the path of this new lawgiver, the Christ, 
of whom Moses was a prophet, which he 
had not seen on earth.1. Standing for the 
majesty of law, and insisting upon obedi- 
ence, Moses had seen the law broken, and 
was not unconscious of the ruin it wrought 
in the disobedient nature. There came 
into existence a temple service in the taber- 
nacle and a series of sacrifices, which, as 
many another unspoken movement of the 
deeper consciousness of man, pointed to the 
Lamb of God which taketh away the sins 
of the world.2, The serpent was lifted up 
in the wilderness? The interest with 
which the leader of the exodus had 
watched the beneficent influence of these 
and felt their insufficiency in a soul which 
confessed it in prophecy, had grown, as, 
near the Throne of God he had, for these 


1 Delitzsch, Old Testament History of Redemption, 
p. 7I. 

2 Liddon, Zhe Divinity of Christ, p. 103. 

8 Exodus xxvi. ; Hebrews ix. Io, 


The Appearance of Moses. 153 


fifteen hundred years, found a point of 
view from which he saw the concerns of 
man. This heavenly life could not have 
lessened his sense of the majesty of law. 
He must have held to the great idea which 
he gave to mankind, with a firmer hand, as 
he learned that its source was Love. It 
must have seemed a more terrible thing 
that any man should ever have broken it. 
His system of sacrifices — how little could 
it do. Nothing but Love’s own sacrifice 
could answer ; and when, in glory ineffable, 
Moses stood with the Christ, the truth of 
Sinai grasped the fact of Calvary, and the 
voice that gave the law spoke of “ the de- 
cease which He should accomplish at Feru- 
salem.” } 

It was a moment in Christ’s life and in 
the spiritual culture of those disciples 
when that shadow had grown intense as 
midnight. If never before, Moses had 
given them all to know that the skies 
were bending with a mighty interest over 


1 Numbers xxi. 8 ; John iii. 14. 


154 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


this long tragedy, and that the zenith was 
over Golgotha. The great central fact of 
earth’s history was also the great central 
fact of the happiness of heaven, — the 
death of Jesus of Nazareth. To the 
broken-hearted Christ, what a ministra- 
tion of power! Earth with its noise and 
empire of evil might forget the lonely 
Galilean peasant who had “ not where to lay 
His head,” but heaven’s most illustrious 
citizen would speak to Him of the quench- 
less interest of the skies. Jews whom he 
came to save, the nation whose only real 
patriot He was, might scorn to mention a 
scene which should bring into itself the 
odium of centuries, and a mode of death 
which would exile His name from the lips 
of men; even His disciples might push 
away from their vision the horrible fancy 
of an outlaw’s death for Him, but Moses, 
the most colossal figure of their history, 
their statesman and God’s friend, had come 
in that hour, with the flash of the throne 
yet in his eye and the life of eternity in 


The Appearance of Moses. 155 


his voice, to speak with Him, not concern- 
ing the brilliancy of His transfigured face, 
or even of the raptures of the blest, but 
only of that topic so carefully avoided, — 
“the decease He should accomplish at Feru- 
salem.” 

Here, then, does Moses confess that 
the law of all other laws is that of self- 
sacrifice. It is the law of all other laws, 
because it is the law of Love, whose 
method all law is. Moses, looking from a 
heavenly point of view, sees in this mo- 
ment of glory a moment to come which 
Heaven will recognize as having a far 
deeper glory. Itis that which seems dark- 
est to those disciples, for they look from 
an earthly point of view. Moses and the 
Christ speak of this hour to come as the 
time when something should occur which, 
even to Him, would be an achievement. 
They speak about “the decease (or the 
departure) which he should accomplish? at 


1“The decease which He was about to accomplish 
denotes, not the finishing of life by dying (Bleek), but 


156 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Jerusalem.” Afterwards, when Jesus stood 
alone with the world, He saw the same 
glory of Calvary. “ The hour is come,” 
said He, “‘ when the Son of man should be 
glorified.””+ Still, the greatest assertion 
is that of His whole career as to the 
authority of this law of self-sacrifice. In 
the consciousness of power, which Satan 
confessed,? He chose weakness in life, and 
confronted death, saying: “Mo man taketh 
My life from Me, but I lay it down of My- 
self.”? Whatever truth has been spoken 
in this lecture is summed up in this law of 
self-sacrifice. It is the law of love. In 
Christ, as the manifestation of Love, it 
was the law of liberty. This law of love 
in operation will make us followers of 
Him, and give unto us the same liberty of 
law, making each so truly a law unto him- 


the completion of death itself.” Godet, St. Luke, vol. i. 
p. 428. Cf. Milligan, 7ke Resurrection of Our Lord, p. 
120. 1 Thessalonians v. 9, 10; John vi. 54, 60. 

1John xii. 23. 2 Luke iv. 10, 11. 

8 John x. 17, 18. 


The Appearance of Moses. 157 


self that no man taketh his life from him, 
but he lays it down of himself. To that 
soul Christ has come, not only to fulfill the 
past, but, by His decease which He did “ ac- 
complish” at Jerusalem, to “reconcile” it 
“unto God by His death” that it may be 
“ saved by His life.’ ' In His self-sacrifice, 
we begin our own. The one “made per- 
fect through suffering ” is “‘ the Captain of 
our salvation.” 

“Strong in Thy strength, though in myself but weakness, 

Equal to all I know that I shall be, 


If I can seize the mantle of Thy meekness 
And wrap it close around my soul like Thee.” 


1 Romans v. 10 ; 2 Corinthians v. 18, 19. 








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_ LECTURE VL 
The Appearance of Elias. 











LECTURE VIL 


The Appearance of Elias. 


® And behold there talked with Him two men, which were Moses 
and Elias, who appeared im glory, and spake of His decease which 
He should accomplish at Jerusalem. But Peter and they that were 
with Him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they 
saw His glory, and the two men that stood with Him. And it ame 
to pass, as they departed from Him, Peter s2id unio Jesus, Master, 
it is good for us to be here: let us build three tabernacles; one for 
Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not knowing what he 
said, While he thus spake, there came a cloud and overshadowed 
them, and they feared as they entered mto the doud. And there 
came a voice out of the cloud: sayimg, This is my beloved Son, 
hear Him. And when the voice was past, Jesus wes found alone.” 
— Luxe ix. 30-36. 


S the waters of the Red Sea 
divided themselves at the stroke 
of the rod of Moses, so the brown 

current of the Jordan was broken at the 

touch of the folded sheepskin of Elijah. 

“The law and the prophets” are not the 

names of two great movements, having 

their sources at different fountains and 


It 





162 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


moving through different realms of the 
human soul, but they denote one mighty 
current flowing from one divine wisdom 
and providence, and touching banks which 
are covered with forms of life different 
only by the latitudes through which it 
makes its course. It is not strange that, 
at such evident points of contact, these 
souls, Moses and Elias, should be united. 
A pure theism and its harvest of truth 
and hope for mankind —for these, stood 
these two monarchs of the past. From 
this theism, “the law and the prophets” 
inevitably came. If God was, He ruled; 
this was at the basis of the “/aw.” If 
God was, man’s truest visions of himself, 
and of that which should enable him to 
realize them, had their foundation in His 
very character; and this made “ prophecy.” 
It is impossible to take into the mind the 
one, without receiving with like hospitality 
the other. As our recent thinking puts 
itself into that age, and accepts Moses, it 
finds how naturally, out of laws and pur- 


The Appearance of Elias. 163 
poses of which man is there made con- 
scious, there grows a hope for the future, 
which, uniting itself with the Messianic 
idea, should go out into all the manifold 
spiritual consciousness of Israel, modify- 
_ ing institutions, antagonizing heathenism, 
unifying the people with a hope which 
should always lead, because it could never 
be outgrown. All this repeats itself in the 
human soul. Once let a man adopt as a 
code of life the deliverances of Sinai, and 
the soul becomes its own prophet. It in- 
vests itself with a prophetic enthusiasm, 
and is borne along into new conflicts with 
surrounding evil, as a veritable Elijah. 
That natural Messianic hope, which every 
child of Adam has, which he recognizes, 
even if he says nothing but “It will be 
better some day,” grows more into the 
certainty that somewhere and somehow he 
will be the man he was destined to be, and 
unites to itself every truth and fact that 
may be assimilated into its life; and thus 
Sinai is followed by Carmel. 


164 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Indeed, in Moses himself did the proph- 
et seem to rise out of the lawgiver. He 
was so true to the government of the 
present hour that he reached forward into 
the civilization of the future. When Aaron 
and Miriam said: “Hath the Lord indeed 
spoken only by Moses ? Hath He not spoken 
also byus ?” 1 they obtained information 
from God that He was speaking through 
the lawgiver, in a peculiar manner.? Out 
from the nature of that law there came to 
Moses not only the revelation of the duty 
of the king of that land to which they 
were being led,? but there came also a 
larger vision to which he was true. “ The 
Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a 
Prophet, from the midst of thee, of thy 
brethren, like unto me; unto Him shall ye 
hearken.” * So Moses, yet glowing with 
the manifested glory of God on the Mount, 
possessed the character of a peerless 
prophet. 


1 Num. xii. 2, 2 Verse 8. 
3 Deut. xvii. 14. * Deut. xviii. 15-22. 


The Appearance of Elias. 165 


“And there arose not a prophet since im 
Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord 
knew face to face.”1 In the glory which 
came to him on the summit of Sinai, there 
was a suggestiveness which carried the 
augury of a full revelation. Moses be- 
lieved in God, after a manner that much of 
our superficial theism cannot understand. 
He felt that the future, as the present of 
humanity, was rooted in the nature of God. 
He could give mankind, as he touched it 
in the life of Israel, the vision of no greater 
fact than this: ‘‘ Zhe eternal God is thy 
refuge, and underneath are the everlasting 
arms.’ * Was that which transfigured his 
face to lie hidden forever from men, or be 
only thus partially revealed ? Nay, it would 
open its whole treasure to One, who, by 
nature and holiness, would rise into sover- 
eignty over the guardian law which held it. 
In the solitary experience of Moses, there 
was a disclosure of what lay in God and 


1 Deuteronomy xxxiv. 10. 
2 Deuteronomy xxxiii. 27. 


166 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


what had for a moment touched a human 
face. Moses “wést not that his face did 
shine ;’’ yet he was then a prophet of One 
who, fifteen centuries afterward, should so 
entertain that glory that it should attract 
him from the skies. 

Many were the unnoticed facts which 
entered into the atmosphere of the pre- 
Christian consciousness. They did influ- 
ence, in very evident ways, the fire which 
trembled so uncertainly in the mind of 
Israel ; and it is impossible that, in Moses, 
pure theist that he was, the too brief 
vision! which he had of God should not 
have fed the flame of this vaguely ex- 
pressed hope, which finally was realized in 
One, who, in his presence on Hermon, 
did prove Himself “the only begotten Son, 
which is in the bosom of the Father,” 
“who,” though “xo man hath seen God at 
any time,” “hath declared Him.”* An- 
other proof of this relationship lies in the 
fact that Malachi, ages after prophetism 


1 Exodus xxxiii. 20. 2 John i. 18. 


The Appearance of Elias. 167 


had grown out of the law, speaks of the 
second Elijah,—John the Baptist, — who 
should precede the Messiah in the day of 
Jehovah, and makes one past whose chief 
figures are Moses and Elias.1_ Everywhere 
does Christ Himself recognize the prophet 
in the lawgiver, and the unity of Moses 
and Elias. “Jf ye had believed Moses ye 
would have believed Me, for he wrote of 
Me.”* Hewill not break the bond; He 
says, “ The law and the prophets were until 
Fohn.”* All real prophecy was along the 
lines of law. Its vision-point is the theis- 
tic idea of a divine order. This is such a 
height, that from it prophecy looks over 
ages. All real law is prophetic. It is edu- 
cating a personal life, which shall be free 
from its presence. Its birth-place is the 
theistic idea of man made in the image of 
God. This is such a goal that toward it 
all its powers tend. When He gives His 
commandment, we are told that “on these 
1 Malachi iv. 4, 5. 2 John v. 46. 
8 Matthew xxii. 40; vii. 12, 


168 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


hang the law and the prophets.” Christ 
saw Himself as the conclusion of the soul’s 
mighty argument as disclosed in history. 
Assuming the premises of Mosaism, the 
logic leads through prophetism, and so 
truly ends in Christ that He could say, 
“Do not think that I will accuse you to the 
Father. There is one that accuseth you, 
even Moses, in whom ye trust.”1 Thus, in 
an unsuspected way, was the Christ’s na- 
tive sense of eternity ministered unto, as 
in the distance between Moses and Elias 
He saw the interval of centuries, and yet 
felt in Himself the consummation of that 
process of redeinption which made the 
world’s history a single event. 

So profound is the relationship which 
binds law and prophecy, that their repre- 
sentatives, Moses and Elias, not only ap- 
pear together in the hour of Christ’s vis- 
ible glory, but just as, the law being taken 
up into love in Christ, and having brought 
the world to a new lawgiver, Moses dis- 


* John v. 45. 


The Appearance of Elias. 169 


appeared, so also did Elias, the prophecies 
of the past being realized in a fact which 
was the Christ, who was Himself the new 
prophet. As together they came, drawn 
by the powers which make history, to the 
scene of Hermon, so together they quit 
the spot, where, as they departed, it was 
proposed that this peerlessness of the 
Christ, which they came to confess, should 
be lost sight of. These facts will appear, 
as we note the fulfillment of prophecy in 
Christ Jesus. 

Just as in the quality of the mind 
of Moses there was that which made 
him the fit representative of all law, so 
there is that in the attitude of Elijah, 
rude and wild, yet reverent and awed at 
the mouth of the cave, the avenger and 
the seer, killing the enemy, and at last 
leaving his mantle with one who should 
carry the soul of man nearer to the reign 
of gentleness and the era of love,! which 
makes him gather into his voice the 


1 2 Kings ii. 


170 ~=6 The _ Transfiguration of Christ. 


thousand unspoken prophecies of nature 
and the soul, and makes him speak more 
truly than uninspired lips could speak the 
half-expressed visions which have floated 
before the loftiest minds of other nations. 
Elijah was the personal force which car- 
ried the impulse of the human soul in Is- 
rael over an abyss,! and, in Elisha, con- 
nected it with a life which could not be 
silent, until it was preéminent in civilizing 
power. The prophets are the saviours of 
the times in which they live, by giving the 
disconnected years a sense of that eternity 
which no more surely predicates a past 
than a future. In them, for a moment, the 
Zeitgeist yields to the Lwigketts - Geist ; 
and, in a way to which Matthew Arnold 
seems blind, the Aderg/aube? is the realest 
literature of the soul. Every man who has 
lived has been a prophet of the Christ. At 


1 Delitzsch, Messianic Prophecies, p. 56; Ewald, His- 
tory, vol. i, p. 563. 

2M Arnold, Literature and Dogma, p. 148; God and 
the Bible, p. 157. 


The Appearance of Elias. 171 


his best hours, he has at least dimly felt the 
essential relationship he had in himself 
unto the Supreme. A sense of sin,! which 
has spoken in all literature, has been the 
confession he made of a need which grew 
vocal, as it became too strong for his 
myths, and at last confessed decisively 
that Pan was dead. That sense of sin has 
not been satisfied with its own sacrifices. 
It has looked through them all and dimly 
seen the Sinless One. “If,” said Horace, 
“a guiltless hand hath touched the altar, it 
is as potent to soothe the averted Penates 
with a handful of meal and salt, as with 
the costliest victim.” ? Virgil’s fourth ec- 
logue becomes comparable to Isaiah,* and 
Lucretius speaks these words, — 

“ Nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri 


Vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras, 


1 Ullmann, Zhe Sinlessness of Jesus, chaps. i., ii., iii. 3 
Miiller, Zhe Christian Doctrine of Sin, vol. i. p. 70; 
Kalisch, Leviticus, Essay on Sacrifice. 

2 Abbott, Zhrough Nature to Christ, pp. 126, 127. 

8 James F. Clarke, Zvents and Epochs of Religious 
History, p. 284. 


172 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas 
Ante deum delubra, nec aras sanguine multo 
Spargere quadrupedum, nec votis nectere vota, 

Sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.” 2 


The greatest souls have so confessed 
this sense of sin and this necessity for 
sacrifice that, to an age which listens in- 
tently to the past, the anxious outlooking 
of pre-Christian thought, in a trust vague 
and yet profound, seems in itself a proph- 
ecy most impressive. But this is a single 
line along which the human soul in heath- 
enism sent its eye. Every idol it has made, 
from the most disgusting to a colossal 
Jove, has told of a yearning for an incar- 
nate God ; and every Buddha, princely, sol- 
itary, sad soul, who seeks in vain to solve 
life’s complex problem, testifies of Him 
who, King of Heaven, leaves a throne eter- 
nal to be alone and sorrow-stricken, but to 
solve that same problem, pointing at last 
to the life immortal, as Buddha pointed to 
the extinction of life, to Nirwana. The 


1 Sellar, Roman Poets of the Republic, p. 357+ 


The Appearance of Elias. 173 


Brahmin, unsatisfied with Vishnu’s incar- 
nation, and even with the Krishna of the 
Bhagavad Gita, who yet holds to it as 
his all, is a prophet of that long company 
which “hath been since the world began.” 
God hath not left Himself without a wit- 
ness anywhere ; and, unconsciously, every 
man has his expectant and yearning self 
represented in that conscious vision which 
made the transfiguration of Christ so glad 
an hour to Elijah. This man stands un- 
satisfied, yet hopeful, in the midst of a na- 
tion, either satisfied or hopeless, and thus 
is the type of the prophets of God and 
man. 

All the prophecies of the human soul 
have their best statement and acquire the 
vision of inspiration in the prophecy of 
Israel. By its fulfillment in Jesus, every 
Elijah is present, and, in the hour of the 
Christ’s transfiguration, he yields up his 
office. 

In his masterly way, Delitzsch has justly 
indicated a single phase of the prophecy 


174 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


of the Christ which was latent in the chaos 
at the beginning.1 Obviously, however, 
the earliest prophecy of Christ is the char- 
acter of God. Believing in Him, man be- 
lieves in himself, A pure theism makes a 
race of prophets. Love must reveal Him- 
self, and, if sin come between Him and 
His child, He must reveal Himself as a 
Redeemer. God, as the prophet of Himself 
Incarnate, was the Word, and that was re- 
alized in Christ ; so that when John begins 
the new Genesis, he is more profound 
than the author of the old, and says, 
“Tn the beginning was the Word, and the 
Word was God.”* Creation must hold the 
prophecy which was in the Word from the 
beginning, because it was made “ through 
Him.” So that the “groaning creation” ® 
was the second prophet. If, in the next 
instant of its existence after its beginning, 
it had not “ ¢tvavailed” and thus moved to- 
ward a goal; if it had begun immediately 


1 Old Testament History of Redemption, p. 11. 
2 John i. 1. 8 Romans viii. 22. 


The Appearance of Elias. 175 


to disintegrate and degenerate ; if it had 
even simply stood still, there would have 
been no prophecy in it. But when the 
“travail” began; when the long pain of 
its progress, of which the Bible and sci- 
ence speak, first throbbed, then it uttered 
prophecy. The unincarnate Word pulsed 
in its “gvoan and travail,” as in that life of 
the Spirit by whom Christ cometh again, in 
which we “ have the firstfruits of the Spirit, 
even we ourselves groan within ourselves, 
waiting for the adoption, to wit, the re- 
demption of our body.” Nature’s story of 
woe is our own. Microcosm that this 
body is, it carries in its pain, and into the 
soul’s yearning, the prophecy of the Christ, 
—the expectation of the Reason, Logos, 
— which, because it was the reason for 
creation satisfactory to God in the begin- 
ning, shall be a satisfactory reason to us 
for our created selves. So man, as both a 
child of God and of created nature, the 
two earliest prophets, is the third prophet 


1 Romans viii. 23. 


176 ©The Transfiguration of Christ. 


of the Christ. The word spoken to Adam 
after his sin, “ Where art thou ?”1is God's 
first intimation that He seeks man. It 
was the oldest announcement of the fact 
of which He spoke, when He said, “J have 
loved thee with an everlasting love.” It 
was, as Delitzsch suggests, “designed to 
bring man to Himself.” But it was more: 
it is the assertion of the nature of Love to 
seek and find the sinner, who was hiding 
in fear and shame. It shows how God’s 
own nature, as Love, was the deep 
prophecy of His coming after the sin- 
cursed race, in Christ; and, at the trans- 
figuration, Elijah’s appearance and depar- 
ture told how truly this prophecy was 
fulfilled, in One who so really incarnated 
God that men saw the profound fact: 
“ Herein ts love, not that we loved God, but 
that He loved us, and” —is there not a 
fine logic here? — “sent His Son to be the 
propitiation for our sins.” “ We love Him, 
because He first loved us.”* 


1 Genesis iii. 9. 2 John iv. 10, 19. 


The Appearance of Elias. 177 


From this infinite Love came the word 
of prophecy that the seed of the woman 
should bruise the serpent’s head. “J 
will put enmity between thee and the 
woman,’ said God to the serpent, “axd 
between thy seed and her seed; tt shall 
bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his 
heel,” 1—a prophecy which had been par- 
tially fulfilled in Him who had already be- 
gun to spoil “principalities and powers,’ ? 
to whom in those hours Elias was speak- 
ing, of the death through which “He 
might destroy him that hath the power 
of death, that ts, the devil;”’ and in whom 
it should have complete fulfillment when 
in men, through Him, “the God of 
peace should bruise Satan under their feet 
shortly.” 8 

Out of this infinite Love sprung the bow 
in the cloud,—a prophecy strengthening 
all others,* for it was God’s declaration of 
eternal trustworthiness. On Him, it sig- 

1 Genesis iii. 15. 2 Colossians ii. 15. 

8 Romans xvi. 20. $ Genesis ix. 14, 15, 16. 

12 


178 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


nified, man might rely; and the Messianic 
idea ever after stood more firm because of 
the seven-colored announcement that in all 
this mingling of sun and storm there was 
a faithful God looking through every drop. 
Elijah stood in the very presence of that 
Sun of righteousness as He flashed out 
His latent glory on Hermon. The bow 
was gone, for the air was clear of storm. 
Once more to the race’s childhood must 
God speak ; and to Abraham there come 
the words: “ And in thee shall all the na- 
tions of the earth be blessed,’ +— words 
whose fulfillment is transfigured before him 
in that glorious One, whose Majesty David 
sees, when he says, “ Men shall be blessed in 
Him ; all nations shall call Him blessed ;”* 
whose power goes into the eloquence of Pe- 
ter; and whose unique position in history, 
as Jesus of Nazareth, inspires the teach- 
ing and career of St. Paul.? As Elias, this 
prophet of a later age, saw how, in his own 
1 Genesis xii. 3. 2 Psalms Ixxii. 17. 
8 Romans iv. 16; Galatians iii. 16; Acts iii. 35. 


The Appearance of Elias. 179 


words, there were taken up all the lofty 
meanings which these words had, when 
spoken three times, —once to Abraham, 
once to Isaac, and once to Jacob,— the 
glory of transfiguration grew more intense. 
He was in the presence of the One who 
had thus made a unit of history. Already 
had this fact, moving so triumphantly 
through the eras of Israelitish life, been the 
source of the national spirit. Now, Christ 
was founding a nationality of redeemed 
souls which should include past and future, 
and thus was continuing in Himself with 
a divine power the prophetic benedictions 
which fell from the lips of dying patriarchs. 
In Him, even the past must have grown 
brighter, and, as Elias was seen only in the 
light of Christ’s transfiguration by the dis- 
ciples, so the deep words of ancient days 
were fully understood for the first time. 
Jacob had pointed out the tribe of Judah as 
the royal tribe, in a way that did not portray 
to the consciousness of Israel the features 
of the Christ, but here Elias saw what it 


180 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


all meant. “ Fudah, thou art he whom thy 
brethren shall praise: thy hand shall bein 
the neck of thine enemies: thy father’s 
children shall bow down before thee. 
Fudah is a lion's whelp: from the prey, 
my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, 
he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; 
who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall 
not depart from Fudah, nor a lawgiver from 
between his feet, until Shiloh come; and 
unto him shall the gathering of the people be. 
Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s 
colt unto the choice vine ; he washed his gar- 
ments in wine, and his clothes in the blood 
of grapes.” 1 Elias must have remembered 
how that name Shz/oh stood out in Israel- 
itish history. There the tribe of Judah 
had assembled, in fulfillment of this proph- 
ecy, having received its possession in Gil- 
gal; and, when the tabernacle of the cove- 
nant was pitched there, the victory was 
sure and the land was theirs.2, He must 
have known, also, how royal above the rest 


1 Gen. xlix. 8-12. 2 Josh. xviii. 1; Num. xxiv. 17. 


The Appearance of Elias. 181 


had been the tribe of Judah in the wars of 
the judges? and under the leadership of 
David ? and Solomon,? and how Moses had 
blessed him.* History was eloquent then, 
as he read the prophecy in its fulfillment 
there on Hermon, for he stood in the pres- 
ence of One“ who sprang out of Fudah,”® 
yea, of the “Lon of the tribe of Fudah, 
the Root of David,’ who was then “re- 
vailing to open the book and to unloose the 
seven seals thereof.” ® 
lijah was seeing the triumph of the 

soul which was his companion on that 
earthly visit, and even then stood by him, — 
Moses. With him, he now saw the mean- 
ing of the exodus, the passover lamb, and 
read in the shining face of Christ the un- 
written harmony of the song of Moses and 
that of the Lamb.’ The mediatorship of 

1 Judges i. 2; xx. 18. 

2 2 Samuel ii. 4; Psalm xviii. 40. 

8 1 Kings xii.; 2 Dhronicles x. 11. 

£ Deuteronomy xxxiii. 7. 5 Hebrews vii. 14. 


6 Revelation v. 5. 
7 Deuteronomy v. 23-25; Exodus xx.19; Hebrews 


viii. 6, 


182 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Moses was now lost in that of Christ, which 
fulfilled it.1 The elder prophet and law- 
giver was seen only in the light of this 
prophet which at last had come.” 

“Tf,” says Professor Leathes, “the con- 
sciousness of Abraham was that his seed 
should be the blessing of the world, the con- 
sciousness of Moses was that his prophetic 
office should give place to Another ;” 3 and 
he so awards Samuel the place of the first 
of the prophets, after Moses, as to leave 
out of its full connection a prophetic hour 
for which, on the mount of Christ’s glory, 
Elias must have stood. Delitzsch, among 
others, seems to see “ the image of the fu- 
ture One as it took on the form of a King,” 
in the words of Balaam ;‘ and recent schol- 
arship will agree that this world-blessing 
had its threefold announcement, as seed, 
prophet, and king, when Balaam said: “J 

1 Deuteronomy v. 23-25; Exodus xx. 19; Hebrews 
viii. 6. 

2 Acts iii. 22-24; Acts vii. 37; John vii. 40. 

8 The Religion of the Christ, p. 52. 

4 Messianic Prophecies, p. 40. 


The Appearance of Elias. 183 


shall see Him, but not now: I shall behold 
Him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star 
out of Facob, and a Sceptre shall rise out 
of Israel.’1 For that trumpet-tone stood 
Elias, when he looked at Jesus in that glory 
of which John was a beholder, — John who 
should afterward see this Star from Patmos 
and hear Him say, “/ am the root and off- 
spring of David, and the bright and morning 
Star,’? and see “on His vesture and thigh 
a name written, Kinc oF Kinocs.”? It is 
indicative of the essential melody, which, in 
different natures and at various times, man- 
ifested itself in these prophecies, that Elias 
stood not more for the maternal Hannah, 
singing, “ Zhe adversaries of the Lord shall 
be broken to pieces; out of heaven shall He 
thunder upon them; the Lord shall judge 
the ends of the earth; and He shall give 
strength unto His King, and exalt the horn 
of His Anointed,’ * than for the unknown 
One, who, seeing another side of life’s 


1 Numbers xxiv. 17. 2 Revelation xxii. 16. 
3 Revelation xix. 16. * 1 Samuel ii. 10, 


184 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


problem in the sins of Eli’s sons, looked 
into the same future, and with a vision 
which entered into the very counsel of 
God, proclaimed: “ And I will raise Me 
up a faithful priest, that shall do according 
to that which is within my heart and in my 
mind: and I will build him a sure house ; 
and he shall walk before Mine Anointed for 
ever.” 1 Elias saw all this fulfilled in the 
broken empires, across which the Messiah 
had come with unseen feet, and in that 
priesthood, greater than that of Eli, who 
was the descendant of Aaron, which is “‘ zot 
after the law of a carnal commandment, but 
after the power of an endless life.” 2 

It is the remark of the penetrative 
Horsley that “prediction in its highest 
form, the Messianic, is nowhere more per- 
spicuous than in the Psalms.” Certainly 
the expectation of the past, vague as it 
might have been, gained immensely in 
clearness and intensity as that spirit which 
took form in national songs made for itself 


1 y Samuel ii. 35. 2 Hebrews vii. 11-16, 


The Appearance of Elias. 185 


the literature which we know as the 
Psalms. Whatever their dates, this collec- 
tion of odes is the poetry of a peculiar peo- 
ple, whose whole history must have been 
made under the influence of a certain hope. 
Taking the successive forms of “the seed 
of Abraham,” “the successor in prophecy 
to Moses,” and “the ideal King,” they mark 
the development of a harmony which was 
gathered into the melody of Elias’s tones, 
as on that spot of Christ’s transfiguration 
he felt the security of a yearning past in 
the grandeur of the present. Truly the 
words of the old national hymn, “ He hath 
not dealt so with any nation,’ + must have 
seemed a commonplace announcement of 
the significance of a national history whose 
Christ was so glorious. All that David's 
lyre had yielded of the music of the future 
was more than taken up in “the satisfying 
symphonies” of this “Sox of David,”? 
from the current of whose life there went 


1 Psalm cxlvii. 20. 
2 Cf. Delitzsch, Commentary on Psalms, CX. 4. 


186 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


intimations of a song eternal, the ode of a 
redeemed race. That fore-gleam of light 
which did break upon the Psalmist’s soul 
when he said, “ 7he Lord hath sworn, and 
will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever 
after the order of Melchizedek,’+ Elias now 
saw, in the orb from which it made its way 
through the centuries; for that transfig- 
ured One, Jesus, “was made a surety of a 
better testament,” “hath an unchangeable 
priesthood,’ and is “able to save unto the 
uttermost all that come unto God by Him, 
seeing He ever liveth to make intercession 
for them.”* In that same shining face, 
Elias saw the source of those rays of light, 
which had touched the darkest days of the 
past. The words of God, calling David, 
“ Arise, anoint him, for this is he,’* had 
now their full meaning to the ages,—a 
meaning which Newman, seeing Christ 
transfigured, has recognized in his verses 
concerning David : — 


1 Cf. Delitzsch, Commentary on Psalms, cx. 4. 
2 Hebrews vii. 22, 24, 25. 8 2 Samuel ii. 4. 


The Appearance of Elias. 187 


“ Strange that guileless face and form 
To lavish on the scarring storm ! 
Yet we take thee in thy blindness, 
And we buffet thee in kindness; 
Little chary of thy fame, — 

Dust unborn may bless or blame, — 
But we mould thee for the root 
Of man’s promised healing Fruit.” 


All that this troubled life had of prophecy 
was made real in the sorrow-stricken One,! 
whose face glowed with no glory which 
could keep Elias from speaking to Him of 
His death. Elias was true to facts lying 
as yet unseen when they stirred the souls 
of the national poets. Only in that glowing 
face could he see the power which would 
make true the words, “ For thou wilt not 
leave My soul in hell; neither wilt thou suf- 
Ser Thy Holy One to see corruption ;” * for the 
transfiguration was so clearly the intimation 
of the resurrection, that Jesus, as we shall 
note, put the disciples off, until, in the tri- 
umph at Joseph’s tomb, they could under- 


1 Perowne on Psalm xxxv. 27. 
2 Psalm xvi. Io. 


188 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


stand Hermon’s glory. Only there could 
be gained the significance of the words, 
“ Thou art fairer than the children of men ; 
Thy throne ts for ever and ever.” On Her- 
mon, the sweet note of the old song was 
made true: “Out of Zion, the perfection 
of beauty, God hath shined.” That Psalm, 
with whose martial strain Cromwell’s host 
charged at the battle of Dunbar, with its 
words, “‘ Thou hast ascended on high, Thou 
hast led captivity captive: Thou hast re- 
ceived gifts for men ; yea, for the rebellious 
also, that the Lord God might dwell among 
them,’ 1 was fast becoming history, as 
Elias waited on Hermon, to converse with 
Jesus about Calvary. All these prophe- 
cies, however, made Elias not less inter- 
ested to see, as he did, in speaking to 
Christ about His decease, the fulfillment 
of one prophecy in a lonely sufferer, cry- 
ing, “ My God, my God, why hast Thou for- 
saken Me?” and, at last, of another, when 
“the stone which the builders refused ts be- 


1 Psalm Ixviii. 18. 2 Psalm xxii. 1. 


The Appearance of Ehas. 189 


come the head of the corner,’ and David's 
joy should be complete in the saying of 
“the Lord unto” his “ Lord, Sit Thou at 
My right hand, until I make Thine enemies 
Thy footstool.” * 

More still must this face have shone 
to the great prophet, as he stood with the 
memory of the words uttered so long ago 
by others of his companions in the heav- 
ens. Here he stood in the sound of His 
voice, whose speech had been uttered so 
inadequately by himself and the succeed- 
ing schools. Here was the morning Sun 
whose light had made the sky less dark 
and the times less dolorous, in which Elijah 
himself, Elisha, Obadiah, Joel, Jonah, 
Amos, and Hosea carried the national 
expectation by lofty declaration, by a wise 
and tender leadership, by a quenchless 
hope, by a larger vision, by a typical life, 
by a sweet courage, or by the cry, “ Come, 
and let us return unto the Lord: for He 
hath torn us, and He will heal us; He 


1 Psalm cxviii. 22. 2 Psalm cx. I. 


190 =6©The Transfiguration of Christ. 


hath smitten, and He will bind us up. 
After two days He will revive us: on the 
third day He will raise us up, and we shall 
live before Him.” ? 

Before him stood radiant the One of 
whom Isaiah had spoken. It was “the 
day” of which Isaiah had a sight, when he 
said, “Jn that day shall the branch of 
Fehovah become an ornament and a glory.” 
There was the “vod” which had “come 
Sorth out of the stem of Fesse,” and “the 
branch” which should “grow out of his 
roots.’® ‘The Gentiles” had begun to 
“seek,” and “ His rest” had already been 
“glory.”* “A virgin” had “brought forth 
a son, Immanuel.’*> The very glory of 
heaven was then telling the saints of all 
ages, “ For unto us a child is born, unto us 
a son is given.” “ The government” of the 
future was already “upon His shoulders,” 
and “redeemed” souls, “returning” and 
“coming” “unto Zion with songs and ever- 


1 Hosea vi. 1,2. ? Isaiah xxviii. 5. *% Isaiah xi. 5. 
* Verse Io. § Tsaiah vii. 14. 


The Appearance of Elias. 191 
lasting joy upon their heads,” were “obtain- 
ing 
tng” were fleeing “away.” 1 “ Wonderful, 
Counsellor, Mighty God, Father of Eternity, 
Prince of Peace,’*— lips were already 


2) ¢ 


‘joy and gladness, and sorrow and sigh- 


calling Him by these titles. Breaking no 
“bruised recd,’ quenching no “smoking 
flax,” He was setting “judgment in the 
earth ;” >and the rapturous words of Micah, 
the statesman-like anticipation of Habak- 
kuk,® the echoing language of Zephaniah,® 
the heaven-illumed but tearful vision of 
Jeremiah,’ the fine mysticism of Ezekiel,® 
and the far-reaching hope of Daniel ® were 
being rapidly fulfilled, alongside of the or- 
acles of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. 
That dimly seen Fact which had moved 
through all the eras of their life was a 
Person ; and Elias, coming with the light 
of the heavenly world in his eye, stood 


1 Isaiah xxxv. Io. 2 Tsaiah ix. 6. 

3 Isaiah xlii. # Micah iv. 1; v. 2. 

& Habakkuk ii. 4. 6 Zephaniah iii. Io. 

7 Jeremiah xxiii. 5. 8 Ezekiel xxxiv. 16, 23. 


° Daniel ii. 44. 


192 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


reverently in the glory of the transfigura- 
tion of Christ. 

But with such a complete fulfillment he 
cannot yield even to the proposition of 
Peter ; and after the cloud and the voice 
Jesus is found alone. Just as Moses dis- 
appeared before the new Lawgiver, who 
came not to destroy but to fulfill, so did 
Elias quit the height of Hermon before 
the new prophet, who, while fulfilling the 
past, held the empire of the future. The 
transfigured One was the new prophet, 
whose forecast was inclusive of eternity, 
and whose transcendent point of view was 
the heart of God. The day of Elias was 
done, when at last to the soul of man, 
looking so long from all points on the cir- 
cumference of being, there appeared a 
luminous centre, the Fact Jesus Christ. 
Just as human thought and desire have 
looked centrewards from the many out- 
lying points and been at rest, so the 
centre, fixed in absolute love, has sent out, 
through radii of time which traverse eter- 


The Appearance of Elias. 193 


nity and radii of space which traverse in- 
finity, a lite ever new and renewing, re- 
lating the universe of man and God in 
perennial hope. Jesus is not only the 
Christ of God unto man, but becomes also 
the Christ of man unto God. By realiz- 
ing all the lofty dreams of the human soul 
as it yielded to the brooding love, He 
came into the realm of our visible life to 
be the perpetual source of fairer visions. 
In Him, the soul has an infinite future. 
Jesus of Nazareth is the prophet of human 
nature. Peter did not see all that this 
meant, at the moment of Christ’s transfig- 
uration. But afterwards it came to him 
through the swift-flying years. In that 
second letter, when he would leave the 
church some scene from his memory which 
gathered into its significance the meanings 
of this holy religion, his feet are again on 
Hermon ; his eye is once more fixed upon 
the glowing face of the Christ. “ More- 
over,” he says, “J will endeavor that ye 
may be able after my decease to have these 


194 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


things always in remembrance. For we 
have not followed cunningly devised fables, 
when we made known unto you the power 
and coming of our Lord Fesus Christ, but 
were eyewitness of His majesty. For He 
received from God the Father honor and 
glory, when there came such a voice to Him 
Srom the excellent glory, This ts my beloved 
Son, in whom Iam well pleased. And this 
voice which came from heaven we heard, 
when we were with Him in the holy mount.” 
And what is the truth which came with all 
this glory? This it is, which Peter rushes 
on to speak, “ We have a more sure word 
of prophecy.’ + That more sure word is the 
historic Christ. 

The more profoundly we study Chris- 
tianity and the soul of man, the more 
surely we see the force of the prophetic 
element in Jesus of Nazareth. Whenever 
a human soul begins to yield to His in- 
fluence, there is felt the spell of prophecy. 
The first step is to open the hitherto 


1 2 Peter i. 19, 


The Appearance of Elias. 195 


closed gates of an infinite future, when 
the Saviour is admitted. A soul asks the 
way to God in Christ; and the asking 
comes in a simple plea to be shown the 
way of salvation. There is only one word to 
speak, “ Belzeve on the Lord Fesus Christ.” 
When, in howsoever small measure, it does 
believe on Him, it takes to its native eter- 
nity as a bird to the air of heaven. He 
invites it out into infinities of time, not by 
any abstract explanation of eternity, but 
by bearing its life out upon His own con- 
sciousness of eternity, until, prophet that 
He is, it has its own consciousness, in 
which self-sacrifice and the immortal life 
are inevitable. In Christ, its dumb proph- 
ecies are fulfilled ; the soul finds use for its 
breadth of wing. And this use is the be- 
ginning of the Christian experience, and 
that gives significance to this opening 
hour of its life in Christ. To use His 
own figure of the vine, so prophetic is the 
vine on which the branch now finds itself, 
that it thrills with the new life, and the im- 


196 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


pulse of its vital energy is “che power of 
an endless life.” No longer does it wither 
with lack of vitality, for it has surging 
through it the life of God, and that, being 
the motive power of the universe, allies it 
with the concerns, not of a spot of earth, 
but of infinity. An alliance is formed in 
Christ with the order of the universe, and 
the future is secure. As the Christian life 
goes on, it is the more prophetic. Christ 
unfolds the depths of His own nature in 
the unfolding of the spiritual conscious- 
ness, and every new break of the old life is 
a bud, which is to be a blossom, which is 
to fall away only for fruit having in itself 
many seeds. As times and seasons change 
and pass, it grows to be a still “more sure 
word of prophecy.” The higher the re- 
ality, the loftier the summons in Christ’s 
inspiration and command to a still more 
holy life which shall be a matrix for the 
future. “Perfect even as the Father in 
heaven is perfect :” —as long as such an 
intimation comes from Christ to the soul 


The Appearance of Elias. 197 


there will lie before it a land in which 
prophecy and fact are one. In the glory 
of the transfiguration, a prophet was seen, 
whose glory naturally changes the soul 
“from glory unto glory.” 

Paul saw the prophetic force of His sal- 
vation when he said, “ But we all with open 
face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the 
Lord, are changed into the same image from 
glory unto glory, even as by the spirit of the 
Lord.” Peter said the voice came from 
“the excellent glory.” New heavens were 
unfolded. Who shall say where His “ Fo/- 
low Me” shall cease to sound upon man’s 
listening soul? “Such trust have we 
through Christ to God-ward’* that an in- 
finite prophecy abides. In reverence, the 
soul sees Christ confer what seem His 
peculiar powers upon its advancing life. 
These words become the new points of 
vision for men. From them, the holy of 
all ages have noted how above all our con- 


1 2 Corinthians iii. 18. 
2 2 Corinthians iii. 4. 


198 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


ceptions dwells the Incarnate God, and 
yet how more familiar than our hope is 
His ever-enlarging humanity. When Jesus 
offers the treasures of His grace, the heart 
often has the experience of that elder 
Ephraim of whom Hosea heard God say, 
“TI have written unto him the great things 
of my law, but they were accounted a strange 
thing.” 1 Never more than when Christ 
offers the soul all that it may have does it 
need the faith of Abraham, who “ staggered 
not at the promise of God through un- 
belief.”* We are dazzled into doubt often- 
times by the lustre of a crown of which 
we get visions now and then. “The 
severe prerogatives of an existence half 
divine are ours.” Yet calmly does Jesus 
go on, fulfilling, yet prophetic, to open the 
new treasures in Himself, until at last He 
comes to that high priestly supplication, 
a petition and a prophecy, inclusive of the 
sad lyric notes of a broken heart and the 
epic strains of an assured triumph, and 


1 Hosea viii. 2. 2 Romans iii. 20. 


The Appearance of Elias. 199 


prays, “ The glory which Thou gavest unto 
Me I have given unto them, that they may 
be one, even as We are one, lin them and 
Thou in Me, that they may be made per- 
fect in one.” 1 As His own stature rose in 
that solemn air and assumed its heavenly 
proportions, so truly was He the prophet 
of man that man seemed to rise with Him. 
The testimony of all other powers is con- 
fined to the realm of fact, but the “ ¢estz- 
mony of Fesus ts the spirit of prophecy.” 
This fulfilling Fact, whose face shone, 
and who then began anew the career of an 
eternal prophet, was all these, because He 
was the Saviour of the human soul from its 
sins. The presence of Elias, departing only 
after he had conversed with Him concern- 
ing the “decease which He should accom- 
plish at Ferusalem,” was in harmony with 
the relations of the death of Christ to the 
feelings of the soul, as expressed in all 
prophecy; to the need, and therefore to 
the sacrificial gift out of God’s love; to the 


2 John xvii. 22. 2 Revelation xix. 10, 


200 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


salvation which should save men; to the 
obedience and love of a law whose right- 
eousness was emphasized in the work of 
redemption. To complete this work of re- 
demption, this new prophet of humanity, 
to whom the past surrendered, as its great 
figures disappeared, was to found a race of 
prophets whose lives should be lived by 
the law of His life, — self-sacrifice, —and 
the secret of whose whole power and hope 
lay in the cross. So Elias talked of His 
decease. The old minstrel sounded on 
that harp, whose string then received his 
last touch, the key-note of the future. The 
prophets of humanity still see furthest, 
when from Hermon they look by way of 
Calvary. 


— “All through life I see a cross, 
Where sons of God yield up their breath; 
There is no gain except by loss; 
There is no life except in death, 
Nor glory but in bearing shame, 
Nor justice but in taking blame ; 
And that eternal Passion saith, 
‘Be emptied of glory, and right, and name!’”2 
1 Olrig Grange. 


LECTURE VIL 
Jesus Only. 


\ y 
a 





DLL LDS 


LECTURE VIL 





Jesus Only. 


“« And Peter said, Master, it is good for us to be here; let us build 
three tabernacles; one for Thee, one for Moses, one for Elias: not 
knowing what he said. While he thus spake, there came a cloud, 
and overshadowed them, and they feared as they entered into the 
cloud. And there came a voice out of the cloud: saying, This is my 
beloved Son, hear Him. And when the voice was past, they saw 
no man save Jesus only.”— MATTHEW xvii. 4; Mark ix. 8, 9; 
LUKE ix. 30-36. 


HE transfiguration of Christ fur- 
nishes an illustration of how 






= 


re 
found the greater upon the less, and to 
rest the partially understood present upon 
the evident past. As we have already 
seen, the coming of Christ unto men so 
restores the integrity of the soul that the 
intellect recovers its native logic ; and that 
fact is nowhere more clearly shown than 
in this: that when the Christ has His full 


influence upon the soul the mind is con- 





men are continually prone to 


204 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


verted, the order of thought is reversed, 
and the past is understood in the fact of 
the present and in the promise of the 
future. “We walk by faith, not by sight.” 
It is evident that Peter had not yet taken 
the Christ fully into the currents of his 
life. His Lord shows this, when He puts 
them off, and asks them not to speak of 
this scene until the resurrection from the 
dead, when, in them, there should be a 
risen Christ which should justify and make 
clear the Saviour whom they had so unin- 
telligently followed. Then, He seems to 
say, full faith in the transfiguration will 
come. Peter furnishes, in himself, the por- 
trait of a piety which has not been “ bur- 
ied in His death” nor yet has “risen with 
Christ.” His proposition to build three 
tabernacles indicates the desire he had 
that his Christ, as well as himself, should 
have the visible association of these mon- 
archs of the past. These words show that 
Peter, at least, thought that he understood 
Jesus. In the unexpressed panic of their 


Jesus Only. 205 


souls, they caught upon Moses and Elias, 
these great figures vouchsafed from the 
unseen, as means of estimating the Christ, 
instead of clinging to Him as the one Fact 
which then and there flooded the whole 
past with such a radiance that all its steps 
must seem a divine path. Peter saw such 
a triumph in that hour, for his Christ, that 
he would have been glad to have those 
who made it stay and continue it. But that 
would have been to found a commonwealth 
of three citizens, Christ, Moses, and Elias, 
to the impossibility of whose existence 
that cloud, be it ‘“‘shekinah of radiance”’ or 
barrier of darker folds, with its voice gave 
its testimony. That cloud rolls yet before 
the eyes of any mind which has done such 
wrong to its powers of discovery and their 
Lord as to find no infinite difference be- 
tween the leader and lawgiver of Israel 
and the Saviour of men. It comes yet 
from any Hermon-height of our culture, 
drifting from the snow which makes it, 
and lingering like a phantom, until it 


206 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


speaks with a revelation to that soul 
whose spiritual life knows no difference 
between the touch of an infinite Christ 
and the influence of the mighty spirits 
who cleared the way for Him. 

The spiritual life of our time confesses 
its character in a literature which builds 
tabernacles to a lofty legalism and a wan- 
dering hope. It is the hour of Christ’s 
transfiguration. Let us not continue the 
error of mistaking it for the hour of His 
resurrection. Literature, the record of the 
soul’s life, is a snow-crowned Hermon. 
On this height the face of Jesus shines. 
From the romance-criticism of Renan to 
the elegant paganism of Arnold, we hear 
the unwilling confessions of the glory in 
Jesus of Nazareth, When Emerson is 
asked why he does not include Jesus 
among his “representative men,” he con- 
fesses the glistening garment which He 
wears by saying, “It takes too much 
strength of constitution to do that.”!- The 


1 Bartol, Principles and Portraits, p. 221. 


Jesus Only. 207 


Occident is told by the Orient that He is 
theirs,! and confessions from the East aver 
that the Hermon on which He stands is 
loftier than their Himalayas. The poetry 
of our day is the lyric of His sad life, and 
the epic of His career will be gathered, 
here a line and there another, from strains 
which use all the rhythms of the soul. 
Science confirms His theories of life; and 
the infinity in which He lived seems surer 
to philosophy than all else. The student of 
history and of man beholds the transfigu- 
ration of the Nazarene, and has a “ NMovum 
organum.” A Napoleon confesses, “JZ 
know men, and tell you that Fesus is not 
a man. Comparison is impossible between 
Him and any other being in the world. He 
zs truly a being by Himself.” 

Thus, in the darkness, does the face of 
Christ shine. Many a Peter, seeing how 
the law of human life seems to give its 
recommendation to the Christ, and noting 
how the hopes of man gladly recognize 


1 Mozoomdar, Zhe Oriental Christ, p. 116. 


208 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Him as at least a hopeful sign for man- 
kind, proposes to ground the religious life 
here, and in various ways informs the race 
that, at last, Christianity is safe! “Let us 
build three tabernacles.” Let us pause, 
rather, and notice that Christ is not visi- 
ble in the light of their transfiguration, 
but that Moses and Elias are visible in the 
glory of the Christ. Our modern Chris- 
tianity flaunts its weakness in its ready ac- 
ceptance of patronage. We are so super- 
ficial in our Christian life that we bless 
literature and science for coming where 
they certainly must come, or be unseen of 
mankind. Christ, the transfigured, is the 
transfigurer of these. Take Him from his- 
tory, and on what mountain top could our 
modern lawgivers and prophets gather? 
This is lost sight of, as Peter’s proposition 
comes again to the lips of our anticipatory 
and apologetic religiousness. And there 
is no escaping the saddest phase of the 
fact, namely, that from a band of disciples, 
as aforetime, from whom the cause of the 


Jesus Only. 209 


Christ has special reason to expect the 
truest faith, there do come, in these mo- 
ments of confessed transfiguration, over- 
tures of defence through ardent apology 
and schemes of personal service through 
fancied piety which would identify with 
forces outworn the pervasive, conquering 
Saviour. We seem delighted to find some 
great soul that will make Christ a little less 
incredible to us, through a complimentary 
line, or Christianity a little more easy to 
our native paganism, by a pleasing para- 
graph of praise. Instead of going through 
history with a Fact, the surest we have, 
to explain the otherwise meaningless lives 
of men, to relate the fragments of a divided 
humanity into unity, to lift up the half- 
hearted philosophies of a passing day and 
join them to such truth as shall fulfill 
them, we seek to defend our holy Chris- 
tianity by patronizingly showing its like- 
ness to some far-off humanism, and essay 
to relieve our faith from embarrassment by 
quoting, alongside the sayings of Christ, 
14 


2i0 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


some merely verbal similarity from lips 
which confess the panic of the soul, and are 
soiled with sin. Peter carried the passion 
for comparativism into realms where there 
is but One. More just was he to history 
than we, who seek a new apologetic as we 
gather the words of the stories to find a 
classical element in early Christianity, or 
compare Socrates or Marcus Aurelius 
with the King of Kings. 

A cloud rolls between. Under it our 
superficial faith must learn of its igno- 
rance of history and of its misapprehension 
of religion. With the coming of that 
cloud, it learns that Christ is the light in 
which these are seen; for when He is lost 
to sight, so also are lawgiver and prophet. 
The elegant paganism or the lofty Judaism 
of any age, ancient or modern, is appre- 
ciated alone in the light of Christianity. 
Meaningless indeed were Plato and Seneca 
to the conduct of Greece and Rome; and 
“conduct is three fourths of life.”1 They 


1 Mathew Arnold. 


Jesus Only. 211 


would mean Jess to us, had not Chris- 
tianity rescued them. Take the loftiest 
pre-Christian writer and put the Christ out 
of sight, and lo, the more tenderly he 
speaks the more he seems to scorn the 
hopelessness of the human heart. Plato’s 
beautiful words, “ May I, being of a sound 
mind, do unto others what I would that 
they should do unto me,” would indicate 
only the disproportion of dream and fact 
in the world, were there not One who had 
realized the ideal. The modern words con- 
cerning immortality put into the speech of 
Cato, “It must be so,” would, like many 
real utterances, make the universe false, 
if One, who spake with authority, had not 
said, “Jf zt were not so, I would have told 
you; I go to prepare a place for you.” 
Only when, in peerless glory, we see 
the Christ transfigured on heights of hu- 
man thought, or on the facts of modern 
progress, does every prophet’s whisper 
concerning Him become audible. Then 


2 John xiv. 2. 


212 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


we know what the mind of Plato was aim- 
ing at when he said, “We will wait for 
one, be it god or god-inspired man, to 
teach us our religious duties, and, as 
Athene in Homer says to Diomed, to take 
away the darkness from our eyes;” or 
when he said, “We must lay hold of the 
best human opinion, in order that, borne 
on it as on a raft, we may sail o’er the 
dangerous sea of life, unless we can find a 
stronger boat, or some word of God, which 
will more surely carry us.” But the mo- 
ment we confuse the relations of Plato and 
the Christ, and seek to make them equal, 
they both disappear in the cloud. There is 
no Saviour, then, and Plato means nothing. 
The soul is living over again, in our age, 
its pre-Christian era; modern literature is 
full of a lofty legalism and eloquent with 
the prophecy of a Christ. God doth not 
leave Himself without a witness. The mis- 
sionary of the nineteenth century has only 
to say in certain circles, “As certain of your 
own poets have said,” to repeat Paul’s ex- 


Jesus Only. 213 


perience with classicalism. Our Moses is 
a Stoic; Elijah to-day is Hellenic rather 
than Hebraic ; and in these hours of apol- 
ogetic Christian life, there is no greater 
danger to the Church than that her Peters 
will so persist in building like tabernacles 
to literary prophecy, scientific legalism, 
and historic reality, that she and the 
world shall lose the unconscious message 
of Huxley and Arnold, with the Christ, in 
nineteen centuries of whose light they 
may be seen. The cloud has already come 
over us; we feared as we “entered” it; but 
that cloud is lifting, and as the Voice 
speaks, “ 7hzs is my beloved Son, hear 
Him,” there comes to sight “xo man 
save Fesus only.” 

This has been the error of one wing of 
a Christian life, which must ever be apolo- 
getic or nothing. The error of the other 
wing, safe as it supposes itself to be in 
theories of inspiration, is quite as remark- 
able. As the cloud has gathered over 
heads which were indubitably orthodox, 


214 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


and as, in spite of all protests, we have 
entered it, there has been a large proclama- 
tion of “fear.” The whole body of theol- 
ogy has seemed to be going, and the con- 
sternation has been pathetic. But the 
cloud has been a “ dright” one, though it 
“overshadowed” us; and now we see that 
we had too nearly identified facts of the 
most vital difference in quality and im- 
port, and had thus brought upon our pow- 
ers of spiritual apprehension a vagueness 
of perception and an obtuseness of appre- 
ciation which did not render less dense the 
cloud which produced our distrust, whose 
largest element was “fear.” This has 
been the history of much of the world’s 
skepticism. History is simply repeating 
itself along this line, in our querulous 
and startled time. The era of theological 
thought preceding our own had too nearly 
identified Judaism, legal and prophetic, 
with Christianity. A far too Mosaic con- 
ception of God had passed as a neces- 
sity to any correct creed. A spirit of ec- 


Jesus Only. 215 


clesiasticism and an attitude toward those 
who differed from the traditional thought, 
quite like that of Elijah after the sacrifice 
on Carmel, had possessed the church. A 
conception of the perfect sacredness of 
some history and of the total unsacredness 
of other chapters of history, called “ pro- 
fane,’ which conception was essentially 
Jewish, was made to survive or perish 
alongside the burning words of St. Paul 
at Athens, or the words of Christ on 
the Mount. Where this was questioned, 
men were informed, theology was to stop. 
“Let us build three tabernacles: it is 
good for us to be here,” said many a Peter, 
“not knowing what he said.’ Ue has had 
time recently, under the cloud, to find out 
just what he said. Dogmatism is now 
much more nearly proportioned to intelli- 
gence. Under the blur which he has 
made of the character and authority of 
Christ, in the attempt to identify Him 
with Moses in doctrine or in power, we 
have known what it is to be “afraid” of 


216 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


the loss of truth. But, as of old, it has been 
a “bright cloud.” For a time it seemed to 
some faithless ones as though criticism 
would leave the top of Hermon, not only 
without a Moses and Elias, but also with- 
out a Christ. All were hid for a moment. 
But a Voice is now speaking out of the 
cloud ; and whenever the church fully hears 
the message, “ Zhzs zs My beloved Son, hear 
Him, and proclaims Jesus only, the last 
vapor of our skepticism will lift and pass 
away, and “ Fesus” will be “found alone.” 
The inspiration and significance of the 
Old Testament are found in the New. 

Of far more consequence is the error in 
our religious life which carries such deso- 
lation. We are pouring the “new wine” 
into “old bottles ;’’ and the new wine is 
being lost. A legal and constrained Chris- 
tian life and an anticipatory gospel upon 
our lips and in our hearts are proof 
enough of how Peter has perpetuated unto 
our day his desire to build three taber- 
nacles. <A brief study of our Mosaism, of 


Jesus Only. 217 


motive and life, will indicate the supreme 
value of the cloud whose overshadowing is 
so significant. 

Every human being is conscious, in pro- 
portion to his thoughtfulness, of the pres- 
ence of law with which he has to do. Our 
day has a thousand voices proclaiming its 
omnipresent reign, and a thousand other 
voices declaring the worth of liberty. It 
would seem just the hour in the history of 
ethics when the law of liberty might be- 
come the law of man’s life. But intel- 
lectual perceptions are ever apt to be 
one-sided ; and our era of intellectualism, 
in the church and out of it, has seen, 
at a single moment, but one side of this 
“law of liberty.” It has thus strength- 
ened the hold of the conscience upon 
Jaw at one time, and the hold of the will 
upon /zderty at another. Thus, the mind 
has been divided against itself, and the 
whole truth has been lost. Where this 
teaching has been the strongest in speech, 
there has been nothing real offered to the 


218 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


mind which would unite these two seem- 
ingly diverse powers, law and _ liberty. 
The church has been far too forgetful that 
one Fact alone, personal and authoritative, 
could unite them. Forms and ceremonies, 
ecclesiasticism and doctrines, have been so 
substituted for Him that, in the church, 
men have grasped “/aw,” and out of it 
they have adored “ Uéberty.” “Law” 
alone has degenerated into legalism ; 
“liberty” alone has gone into /bertinism. 
Thoughtful, inquiring natures behold, too 
frequently, a formal, Mosaic spiritual life 
in the church, and a careless, licentious 
paganism outside. Our church-life is the 
confession that we have been building a 
tabernacle unto Moses, because we have 
not lovingly seen the peerlessness of 
Christ. 

Fesus only is the watchword of evan- 
gelical reform. Moses is sublime, but only 
because Christ fulfills him. We shall be 
judged by a law, but, as James suggests, 
it shall be “the perfect law of liberty.” 


Jesus Only. 219 


Under these words there will be a growing 
appreciation of the power of real Chris- 
tianity. We behold its influence now, as 
it is fenced in by formalism and shut 
up by constraint. At the fastened gate, 
Jesus is standing, and the words which He 
speaks are solemn enough to us who are 
living in the careful mechanism of law: 
“Except your rightcousness exceed that of 
the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no 
wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ 
Such an announcement falls with great 
force upon us. For we have been so care- 
ful and painstaking and proper in all our 
mechanical piety. “Is all that to go for 
nothing?” Like the young man, we are 
telling our Master how very faithful we 
have been to the commandments since we 
became members of the church; but when 
He asks for personal and total surrender 
to Him, our piety goes away “sorrowful.” 
Nothing seems so strange to a modern Old 
Testament saint as the treatment which 


1 Matthew v. 20. 


220 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


the New Testament gives to all his la- 
borious concerns about the proprieties of 
piety. He never considers what a thor- 
ough drudge he has made of himself, and 
how slavish has become his religious life. 


He has nothing but “law ;” and lo! he is 
hanging to that, not because he loves it, but 
because he fears to let go. Under what a 
“cloud” he stands, even at the transfigu- 
ration of Christ! But it is a “bright” 
cloud. Heaven is glorious on the other 
side, and when the Voice speaks to that 
soul and tells him, “ Zhzs zs my beloved 
Son,” using the very words of the baptism- 
scene, and adds, “ear Him,” the cloud 
lifts away, and he sees “zo man save 
Fesus only.” We lose even Christ, when 
He is no more than Moses to us. Moses 
must be left behind, because Christ has 
achieved freedom from the burden and 
love of evil; and in that freedom the law is 
more sacred than ever, and the soul is 
“a son, not of the bond woman, but of 
the free.” “Tutors and governors” have 


Jesus Only. 221 


finished their work. “ The fulness of the 
t7me’’ is come, and God hath “sent forth 
His Son, made of a woman, made under 
the law, to redeem them that were under the 
law, that we might receive the adoption of 
sons.” + “Stand fast, therefore, in the lib- 
erty wherewith Christ hath made you free, 
and be not again entangled with the yoke of 
bondage.” * 

Let us not say that the life by law is 
valueless. Every man’s Mosaism is a prep- 
aration for the Christ. A moral man is 
not a pagan; as the Old Testament was 
divine, and not human, after the manner of 
the Phzdo or the mythology of the Hin- 
dus. But over all human life stands at 
this hour the personal Christ. Obedience 
learned in Moses is not to be forgotten in 
Christ. Into a modern Mosaism, however, 
which is full of “ 7how shalt not,’ He in- 
troduces, “ Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
God with all thy heart, and with all thy 
soul, and with all thy mind. This is the 


1 Galatians iv. 5. 2 Galatians v. I. 


222 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


first and great commandment. And the 
second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself. On these two com- 
mandments hang all the law and the 
prophets.” 1 Here then we see, again, that 
the law of liberty and the law of love are 
one. This law of love runs up to God, 
who is Love, and it gets its power there; 
and then, when the knees are trembling 
and the soul is weary, and God seems too 
far off, when the soul cannot grasp the In- 
finite, Jesus Himself offers Himself, not as 
a moralist, but as “tie Son,” who makes 
“free indeed,’ as at once the motive and 
personal object of the soul’s devotion, in- 
clusive of law, because He is God of very 
God; that is, the love of Love to us, — 
Himself, as the life of our living. “ 7hzs 
man must be counted worthy of more 
glory than Moses, inasmuch as He who 
founded the family hath more honor than 
the family. For Moses was intrusted with 
jurisdiction simply as an upper servant of 


1 Matthew xxii. 38. 


Jesus Only. 223 


the houschold, but Christ as the Son who is 
the head of the household.” + 

When, thus, our Christianity is more 
full of Christ, it will be po’ verful in all 
lines of real reform. Solong asa Mosaism 
of life abides, Christian statesmanship can 
hardly be expected to see that not somuch 
in laws made to restrain crime, but in 
building up from within a manhood which 
will freely move toward righteousness, lies 
the work of legislatures and societies. So 
long as the church forgets that “the King- 
dom of God is within,” or nowhere, she 
will be wasting efforts in the attempt to 
push in upon a man a temperance or a 
virtue only from the outside. There is no 
such real foe to the demon of intemperance 
as a loved and personal Saviour. So long 
as a Christian nation has not been blessed, 
in the religious life which it has, by a mo- 
rality deeper than that of Moses, our mar- 
riage and divorce legislation may be ex- 
pected to occupy its present position ; but 


1 Hebrews iii. 2, 6. 


224 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


when out of the cloud God speaks, and we 
see “zo man save Fesus only,” the infamy 
of our sin will be realized and some of its 
pollution purged away. Thus the destinies 
of society and of the nation lie in the 
hands of Christians ; and our own salvation 
waits for the experience in the soul of a 
personal Christ. 

The evils coming and the good detained 
by an anticipatory gospel of life are quite 
as considerable. Our age is wondrously 
prophetic. Elias has tabernacles with the 
Christ ; and such acloud has hidden both, 
as it ever must be, that the human mind 
is bewildered. “Bright” as it is with 
promise that a better hour draweth near, it 
yet “over-shadows ” the church’s work, the 
world’s progress and reform. We are wait- 
ing for a new statement of doctrine, a new 
method of church government, a new apolo- 
getics which shall silence skepticism, and 
an untried reason of some sort which shall 
make us all we ought to be. In our prop 
osition to build to Elias, Christ and Elias 


Jesus Only. 225 


both have left the scene. It is everywhere 
repeated. A soul, a church, or an age, 
which waits expectantly for fresh light in 
the presence of sufficient light for the 
doing of duty, loses even its reason and 
hope for any more illumination. Nothing 
so threatens modern Christianity with dis- 
aster as the disposition to confuse the 
claims of the real Christ and the unspoken 
prophetism which stands waiting. There 
is a moral film which gathers over the spir- 
itual eye, when it looks unappreciatively 
into the face of the shining Christ, — a film 
which hides Him at last from the eye. 
Nothing but the Voice from the cloud and 
the vision of “xo man save Fesus only,” 
received in hearty faith and in total forget- 
fulness of the great souls which crowd to 
His transfiguration, can deliver us from 
that spiritual stupor in which we stand, 
beclouded and afraid. 

I know of nothing which, as a doctrine 
of life, more truly illustrates the passion 
of our century for prophecy, and its forget- 

15 


226 = The _Transfiguration of Christ. 


fulness of facts, and, at the same time, 
shows how really every modern Elias has 
been fulfilled ages ago in Christ, than the 
present influence and certain future of 
Positivism. Comte is our chief modern 
Elias, to whom tabernacles are builded in 
England, France, and America. Dense 
indeed have been the clouds which have 
rolled over the modern mind, in the prog- 
ress of the building. As they roll away, 
we see how gross was the blindness of a 
gospel which has, in itself, principles which 
make Jesus of Nazareth the most vital 
soul of all history, and which, nevertheless, 
at the very hour of His transfiguration in 
recent thinking, makes a conception of 
Humanity which leaves Him out. No 
being of earth has ever so stood for his 
race as did this Galilean. No man among 
men has so felt their cares and carried their 
sorrows as has this Man of Calvary. Nay, 
not the whole race, outside of His soul, 
has so consciously and intelligently borne 
its own problem, to say nothing of finding 


Jesus Only. 227 


its solution, as did this Nazarene. The 
Humanity of Comte, as well as that of Isa- 
iah, is a dream without Him. He makes 
this fiction a reality only at Calvary, for at 
that spot His own life bore its consummate 
fruit. No man so bowed to the service of 
Humanity as the Christ who both lived 
and died for it, yet, being no Comtean, He 
did not worship it. The gospel of Comte 
is self-worship ; for Humanity is made up 
of individuals, and if each worships Human- 
ity, he is worshipping either what includes 
him, or a set of persons who worship him, 
since, at its best, it is a cult wherein each 
man worships the rest. It is a scheme to 
lift the race by the strength of its own 
arms, and to leave out of the effort Him 
who, according to its very principles, has 
the most power. 

Max Miiller tells us that the concept of 
Humanity is the gift of Christ. Only as 
nearly nineteen centuries transfigure Him 
can this modern Elias be seen. As the be- 
wildered thought of our time comes to a 


228 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


calm, and the supremacy of Jesus is con- 
fessed, we see that Christ alone as a per- 
petual Fact furnishes the only Positivism. 
The blind man was a Positivist of a real 
sort when he said: “‘ One thing I know, 
that whereas I was once blind, now I see.” 
The Positive philosophy of the soul comes 
when this prophet and lawgiver of Human- 
ity becomes its Lord and Saviour. The 
Son of God alone is the Son of Man. The 
“Theological Stage” is never passed in a 
true Positivism. The Divine Christ is 
history and prophecy ; and is the centre of 
a Religion of Humanity. No dream of 
Comte has ever outrun the fact in Christ 
Jesus. And by those facts He stands to 
continue His prophecy for Humanity, say- 
ing : ‘‘ Greater works than these shall ye do, 
because I go unto the Father.” 

Thus, the more truly we see the trans- 
figuration of Jesus in our day, the more 
surely are we left in the presence of His 
absolute lordship. Our Judaism, like that 
of the disciples, comes down from the height 


Jesus Only. 229 


of Hermon, saying: “ Why then say the 
scribes that Elijah must first come?” We 
repeat their experience: ‘“ And He said, 
Elyah indeed cometh, and shall restore all 
things: but I say unto you that Elijah ts 
come already, and they knew him not, but 
they did unto him whatever they listed. 
Even so must the Son of Man also suffer of 
them. Then understood the disciples that 
He spake unto them of Fohn the Baptist.” + 
The real prophets of the Christ are too 
full of Him to escape His fate. The Jew 
yet waits for Elijah. To-day, he has a seat 
prepared for him at the circumcision of his 
child ; ata certain moment in the passover, 
the door is opened by the youngest child, 
that Elijah may come in; and, in the era 
of the Talmud, the goods without owners 
were put by until Elijah should come. 
Our Judaic Christianity waits with quite 
as much ceremony for its new light, and 
our anticipatory literary spirit is quite as 
unappreciative of any John the Baptist. 


1 Matthew xvii. 12. 


230 ©The Transfiguration of Christ. 


The days of prophecy are closed so far as 
prophecy means only the foretelling of a 
coming Lord and Saviour. John the Bap- 
tist had come, and the mistake of men had 
been that they had weighed him in scales 
fit only for the elder Elias. This son of 
Elizabeth and Zacharias had a sense of 
present reality that made the dream of 
his soul contemporaneous with its realiza- 
tion in Jesus Christ. Truly, he was “ more 
than a prophet.’ No “reed shaken by the 
wind,” no “man clothed in soft garments,” 
was he, but a child of the past uttering the 
accents of present and future. This man 
had seen the glow of transfiguration in the 
face of the young Man whom the crowd did 
not know ; and that hour marks forever the 
unique spot where the old and the new 
met face toface. “He must increase, but I 
must decrease,’ was the voice of the past 
speaking of “ Fesus only.” “ Greater than 
he,” said the Christ, “zs the least in the 
kingdom of heaven,” 1— words which tes- 
1 Mattthew xi. 1. 


Jesus Only. 231 


tify how, in Christ, the believer begins 
where the prophet ends his life. 

Real Christianity is single-eyed, and 
wants no other vision than that of the 
Person it adores. “Saved by hope,” —yet 
that hope is surrounded by an all-embra- 
cing fact. Our advance comes by going 
the more profoundly into the Reality of 
which our hope is born. Infinity alone 
bounds that advance. “For by one offering 
He hath perfected for ever them that are 
sanctified,’ yet “we shall be satisfied” 
only “when we awake in His likeness.’ 

So full was He of this prophecy in Him- 
self and for them, that the disciples kept 
the memory of Moses and Elias, speaking 
to Him about the “exodus which He 
should accomplish at Jerusalem.” As they 
went back to heaven, He found the glory of 
His transfiguration running through the 
tomb. They could speak to Him about 
death only as the “exodus ;” though the 
words of these heavenly visitants seem to 


1 Hebrews x. 14. 2 Psalms xxii. 15. 


232 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


involve the glory which was to follow. 
They, however, must be silent about the 
secrets whose key He carried. But He 
could prepare His disciples to utter the 
magic word, “ He is risen from the dead,” 
—a word which even they could not have 
then understood, the connection of which 
with the transfiguration we shall study in 
the next lecture, 


LECTURE VIII. 


The Transfiguration and the Resurrection. 


‘« Whether we be young or old, 
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, 
Is with infinity, and only there! 
With hope it is, hope that can never die, 
Effort and expectation and desire, 
And something evermore about to be.” 
WorDSWORTH. 





CFSSRSS 


LECTURE VIII. 


The Transfiguration and the Resurrection. 


*« And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, 
saying, Tel] the vision to no man until the Son of man be risen again 
from the dead. 

* And they kept that saying among themselves, questioning one 
with another, what the raising from the dead should mean.” — Mark 


ix, Q, 10. 


HE transfiguration, as we have 
studied it, was a brief, partial, but 





significant manifestation of the 
hidden power and reserved glory in the 
Christ. It was an hour when the veil was 
withdrawn from before the Throne, and a 
glimpse was vouchsafed of “ Him that sit- 
teth thereon,” “on whose vesture and thigh 
a name is written, King of Kings and 
Lord of Lords.” A single look, across 
nineteen centuries, upon that shining face 
makes the mind confess the inevitable- 


1 Revelation xix. 26. 


236 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


ness of the event. The time had come 
when the Being who had bowed Himself 
in humiliation, in obedience to laws which 
traverse the lower realm of human life, 
must lift Himself, if only for an hour, to 
His natural place, and assume His normal 
attitude in the universe; and, having thus 
come face to face again with the laws which 
traverse an upper zone, be smitten with 
the ancient “ glory” which He “had with 
the Father before the world was.” } 

We have noticed how, in the very splen- 
dor of this glory, Moses and Elias, free 
from the restraints of space and time, yet 
so visible that the disciples recognized 
their presence, conversed with the glorified 
One about “the exodus which He was about 
to accomplish at Ferusalem.’ We must 
agree that though Christ spoke most prob- 
ably in Aramaic, that word éfodev, which 
must have been an equivalent, means more 
than death, although death be the inciden- 
tal fact in the exodus of Christ from this 


1 John i. 14. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 237 


world. If we turn to Christ’s own view of 
His death, it becomes clear that such a 
word as exodus, rather than the word death, 
is in harmony with His thought. Looking 
out of the deepest gloom, He says, “And 
now, O Father, glorify thou me.’+ Moses 
and Elias, “clothed upon” with spiritual 
bodies, were speaking in harmony with 
His idea of His death and its issues, and 
in harmony, as it is seen, with the facts to 
come, when they spoke of the “ exodus,” — 
a word which may be said to include much 
that was immediately beyond the decease 
of Christ. So, while Moses and Elias 
were speaking, there was an intimation of 
a glory whose existence was bound up with 
His leaving this life; and this future glory 
seems to have been suggested by, or at 
least related to, the glory of that transfig- 
ured face. The step then taken seemed 
to involve the necessity of another in the 
same process. Indeed, Christ clearly rec- 
ognizes the fact that the disciples need to 


1 Milligan, The Resurrection of our Lord, p. 262. 


238 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


have this scene connected in their minds 
with something which may make it plain. 
They had heard the conversation about the 
“ exodus”’ which He was to “ accomplish 
at Ferusalem.’ But that exodus meant 
only the death of their Lord to them, as 
yet. Christ saw their confusion in the 
words of Peter. Ever conscious, as He 
wzs, of how an unrelated truth, or an iso- 
latcd fact, however luminous, deranges 
rather than continues the mind’s steady 
advance, He bids silence until the greater 
truth and fact, to which this is related, 
shall come to their growing culture. In 
doing this, He showed that that glory be- 
yond, of which this was such a strong in- 
timation that Moses and Elias in its light 
talked about His exodus} rather than His 
death alone, was the same glory of that 
coming morning when it should be said at 
the grave where He was buried: “He zs 
not here; He is risen.’ “ He charged them 


1 Dr. Westcott on John xii. 32. “The Ufting up in- 
cludes death and the victory over death.” 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 239 


that they should tell no man what things 
they had seen, save when the Son of man 
should be risen from the dead.” 

Jesus did not attempt to put the trans- 
figuration out of their thoughts, by telling 
them to forget it. He might have felt sure 
that these three chosen ones, who were the 
recipients of the special culture of that 
particular friendship, would not lose their 
hold on a continuous thread of teaching 
by this mighty event. Yet He knew that 
others would; and He must have thought 
also how even these three, by saying noth- 
ing about it to others, would attach no is- 
olated or wondering significance unto it, 
and might yet, in secret, experience its 
influence at the very centres of their life. 
There was an hour beyond in Gethsemane, 
when they would be alone with Him again ; 
and there were others on Calvary, where 
they would need to explore the entire past 
to find any memory of their Lord which 
would lend a ray of light to their gloomy 
souls: then, the private memory of the 
transfiguration might furnish illumination. 


240 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Deeper, however, than any immediate 
purpose of Jesus was the reason of this 
charge. It lay in the nature of things, as 
at that moment things had peculiar illus- 
tration in the career of Jesus of Nazareth. 
That wondrous unity of life, to which atten- 
tion has been called, was disclosing itself 
again. The life of Jesus was one process 
of divine self-manifestation. His transfig- 
uration marks one of its stages ; His resur- 
rection marks another. The same latent 
power which made His face shine at Her- 
mon carried His body at a later day 
through the broken sepulchre and past the 
Roman guard. In one, Christ’s “ power” 
was manifested as “glory;” in the other, 
His “glory” was manifested as “ power.” 
Jesus is “declared to be the Son of God with 
power, according to the spirit of holiness 
by the resurrection from the dead.’1 The 
resurrection was the gleaming fact which 
shone through His death with such trans- 
figuring glory as to give Moses and Elias, 


1 Romans i. 4. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 241 


whose bodies of resurrection were seen in 
the light of Christ’s transfiguration, not 
death as their theme, but the exodus, — of 
whose glory they could see a prophecy in 
that glowing face. It needs only to look 
into the crucifixion, as the event where 
Christ, by His blood, gave His life to the 
world, to see the relation of the transfigura- 
tion to the resurrection of Christ, at the 
most decisive moment of His career. So 
clear and so involved with other phases of 
the gospel ?is this, that Delitzsch, speaking 
on the “d/ood” and its symbolism, says: 
“ As far as concerns the presentation of the 
blood, the Rzsex One has brought before 
God, His Father, in the vessel of His body, 
transfigured yet identical with what it had 
been when crucified, His blood ¢ransfig- 
ured, yet identical with what it had been 
when shed, and this high-priestly self-pre- 
sentation of the Redeemer is become the 
eternally effective settlement of our eter- 
nal Redemption.” 2 


1 Steinmeyer, Passion and Resurrection History, p. 254. 
2 Hebr. Brief, p. 393, quoted by Professor Milligan. 


242 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


In this mention of the resurrection to 
His disciples, as they came away with 
Him from the mountain-summit, there is 
the most satisfying evidence that the 
transfiguration had done its work of in- 
spiration and assurance upon His sad spir- 
it. He now saw through death to victory, 
so clearly that ever after He would have 
His disciples think of this recent event in 
the light of another event yet more glori- 
ous. A mightier certainty of being filled 
with Omnipotence possessed the outcast 
Galilean. It was a certainty so instructive 
to Him that He would have His disciples 
cherish it for their dark hours. In its 
illumination, there stretched fronr His 
weary feet a pathway through the grave of 
Joseph of Arimathea; and the moment of 
transfiguration and that of resurrection be- 
came unto Him the two points in time 
where the divine Omnipotence and glory 
should be remembered to have been irre- 
sistible. 

There were, thus, in these two events, 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 243 


a relationship of power and a relationship 
of glory. In dealing with the transfigura- 
tion alone, noting how the nearer we come 
to the divine the more we see the majesty 
of law and the orderliness of God, we have 
found that it does not detract from the 
proper deity of Jesus to behold, in the 
event of Hermon, how large and vital a 
condition His personal holiness was to any 
such scene. However much His holiness 
—as a personal harmony with the uni- 
verse, rising as it does into serviceableness 
unto moral aims and forces — was the con- 
dition of His transfiguration, we must ad- 
mit that it was a more thoroughly disci- 
plined, mature, and therefore resistless 
force, when the day of gloom came over the 
newly occupied tomb of Joseph. Indeed, 
in a text already quoted, there is contained 
a direct presentation of the fact that the 
power of holiness, either by its grasp upon 
the laws unseen through an aim that in- 
cluded their ministries, or by its being in 
itself the Love itself whose order they 


244 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


were, and which gathered them all into the 
highest and most inclusive law that could 
be, — the law of life through death, — did 
prove its necessary supremacy and mani- 
fest its natural energy in that open grave. 
Jesus is “declared to be the Son of God 


with power.’ According to what? “ Ac- 
cording to the spirit of holiness.” By what? 
“ By the resurrection from the dead.” 

It is certain that only the attitude and 
feeling of holiness, on the part of man, can 
serve as the condition of sovereignty over 
nature. Every day the chemist, in his per- 
sonal alliance with a natural order, sees, 
inside of that order, the operation of one 
law issue forth into another, at the touch 
of a personal force. Nothing but deepest 
“holiness” toward nature can at all see how 
“the old order,” in a test-tube, “changeth, 
giving place to new.” These changing 
“orders,” one circle breaking into another, 
seem to break, in our time, into a circle the 
segments of whose circumference are being 
seen, — the law of life out of death or by 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 245 


means of death. As man becomes more 
God-like, he is touching laws that break into 
this law. Put into the tomb of Joseph the 
Holiness by which the worlds which man 
studies in test-tube and spectroscope were 
~made, the Personal Order of the universe 
itself, the Logos, the universal dynamic, and 
what could be more natural than the resur- 
rection, — than that Life should break forth 
out of death? The Holiness which per- 
mitted death shall then have justified its 
permission, for ever after it is the servant 
of life; and the resurrection of Jesus 
comes to be what it is assumed to be in 
the Bible, the utterance of the most in- 
clusive law of God, the all-embracing and 
unifying fact of the universe. 

On the resurrection of Christ our cos- 
mology must stand; as on Christ Himself, 
the Zogos, must stand all anthropology and 
theology. The resurrection of the Christ of 
God is that all-inclusive manifestation of the 
Logos, which, in the beginning, moved in 
chaos toward a cosmos, and which, at last, 


246 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


through that manifestation, abolishes the 
primeval discord of Life and Death, thus 
giving man his (Cosmos-Logos) cosmology. 

It is thus plain that the church must 
stand where her Founder placed her, upon 
an event inclusive of al] that concerns 
man. Our gospel is, because of these 
facts, “the gospel of the Resurrection.” 
Christ is “che way, the truth, and the life ;” 
but the Zzfe speaks its largest word when 
it says: “J am the Resurrection and the 
Life.” “ Because J live, ye shall live 
also,’ said He who is the Resurrection. 
“Tf Christ be not risen, then is our faith 
vain and our preaching vain.”* It is the 
fact which girds the universe of the seen 
with the reality and authority of the un- 
seen. It is the proof of that divine order 
which is inclusive of our own system; and 
by that event God pledges “ the restitution 
of all things.” * “ Repent ye,” said Peter, 
“that He may send the Christ who hath 


1 John xi. 25. 2 John xiv. 19. 
8 y Cor. xv. 14. 4 Acts iii. 21. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 247 


been appointed for you, even Fesus: whom 
the heaven must receive until the times of 
restoration of all things.’ 1 Into this 
event, every other in the life of Christ and 
every event in the life of man must go 
for their full significance. 

The transfiguration of Christ had pecul- 
iar characteristics, besides this, which 
would relate it to the resurrection. Yet 
they all depend upon the fact that the 
Logos in the transfiguration had just inti- 
mated the native mastery which He had, 
and the supreme relation which He held 
to the universe, or that Christ had by per- 
sonal holiness utterly yielded in the res- 
urrection to the power which for an hour 
glorified Him in the transfiguration. Yet 
that power was He, — “J and my Father 
are one.’* The resurrection completed the 
transfiguration. What was partially seen 
by those three on Hermon was seen more 
fully by Mary and the other women,’ by 

1 Acts iii. 21. 2 John x. 30. 
8 Luke xxiv. 10, 


248 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Peter,! by the disciples on the road to Em- 
maus,? by the ten troubled ones,’ by the 
doubting Thomas,‘ by the seven near the 
sea of Galilee,® by “more than five hun- 
dred’’ and by James,® by the triumph of 
Ascension,’ and by a saving appearance to 
an intolerant foe who journeyed toward 
Damascus. He had been ‘¢ransfigured ; 
He was now transformed. Never again 
was that flesh and blood, sprung from the 
life of the tribe of Judah, to lose a ray of 
its fully achieved excellence. 

So contemporaneous were the truth and 
character of Christ in their steps of growth 
— that is, such a unit was His life — that 
the transfiguration marked one of the 
stages of the transformation which became 
complete at His resurrection. His physi- 
cal life was up with His spirit to the height 
of His personal holiness. As He came 
nearer the cross, and, at last, as we have 


1 Luke xxiv. ro. 2 Luke xxiv. 13-16, 
8 Luke xxiv. 46. 4 John xx. 27. 
§ John xxi. 2. 6 1 Cor. xv. 6, 7. 


7 Acts i. 9. 8 Acts ix. 5. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 249 


seen, at the crucifixion so identified Him- 
self with the Supreme Holiness, His whole 
self was so pervaded with the infinite, that, 
a little later, Jesus was “ declared the Son 
of God with power, according to the spirit 
of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead.” 

Never do the apostles, at the decisive 
moments in their ministry, so speak of the 
resurrection as to break away from this 
suggestive characteristic which it has with 
the earlier event of Hermon. The first in 
the order of Christ’s life seems to be where 
the nascent power of the Christ manifested 
itself as glory; the second where the ma- 
turer glory of Christ manifested itself as 
power. At the transfiguration, there stood 
one beholding the glory and hearing the 
charge to tell no man of this event until 
the resurrection. Peter seems to have 
caught the meaning which Christ had, 
when, forty days after the crucifixion, he 
tries to make clear to his hearers what the 
power was in the day of Pentecost. “He 
had shed forth this, which we both see and 


250 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


hear.” Something, which was forgotten at 
the hour of the denial, had given Peter a 
conception of the Christ as the Omnipo- 
tence of history. As he proceeded, he 
spoke of Him as the One “whom God 
hath raised up, having loosed the pains of 
death, because it was not possible that He 
should be holden of it.’ As His face 
glowed with the “ glory” which He had 
with the Father before the world was, so 
He rose with the “power” that was the 
Son’s when the worlds were created. As 
on the mountain there was no arbitrary 
fracture of a lesser law in whose jurisdic- 
tion Christ had been walking, but rather 
there was a natural issuing of the less into 
the greater, so, at the grave of Joseph, 
God did not loose the pains of death by 
breaking the laws of death’s ministry and 
realm, but, because death is the servant of 
life throughout the universe, God — the 
Order Himself, because, at last, He isa Law 
unto Himself — “ loosed the pains of death, 


1 Rom. vi. 4; 1 Cor. vi. 14. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 251 


because it was not possible that He” — the 
self-conscious Logos— “should be holden 
of it.” 

The resurrection of Jesus is a fact of the 
deepest philosophical significance. Philos- 
ophy is confessing a “groaning creation.” 
It is evident that a Logos has been in 
things from the beginning. The more we 
study the Christ, in the light of the deeper 
thinking of our own day, the more we are 
ready to confess that in Him is “the na- 
ture of things.” Things seem tending 
through all the universe to some such fact 
as the resurrection. Life by means of 
Death — Death as the servant of Life— 
are facts appearing on every side. An oc- 
cult law is touched by the quivering atom 
and the brain of man, which promises a 
goal for creation, —a goal which includes 
not only the transfiguration of matter, 
but its transformation as well. It is with 
a grip almost prophetic that materialism 
will not let the most spiritual scheme for- 
sake matter. God’s truth does not leave 


252 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


itself without a witness in the most be- 
nighted places.1 The problem of the ma- 
terial world is not solved in man, noble 
being that he is, save as man’s life and 
being have their Hermon and stand by the 
open grave of a risen Lord. The Word 
from the beginning, the Logos of the uni- 
verse, comes there to demonstrate that the 
seen exists for the unseen, that the spirit- 
ual will not be submerged in the material, 
but that matter will be transfigured, and at 
last transformed, according to the law of 
resurrection in Christ Jesus. “ Zhe resto- 
vation of all things,’ mentioned in the 
speech of Peter, hovers over like a dream 
which is rapidly being fulfilled in Him who 
zs not only the “ Resurrection,” but also 
“ the first-born of all creation.” * With the 
“new heaven” shall come the “ew earth, 
wherein dwelleth righteousness.” ® 

The resurrection body of Jesus Christ 
was His completely transfigured body. It 


1 Biichner, X7a/ft und Stoff, p. 2 (Aufl. 4.) 
2 Col. i. 15. 8 2 Peter iii. 13, 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 253 


was no longer the body of His humiliation, 
but the body of His glory. Looking from 
the isle of Patmos, John seems not to have 
forgotten the glorious face of the transfig- 
uration, nor the promise that lay in the re- 
quest of Jesus to be silent until the resur- 
rection ; for, beholding his risen Lord, he 
says: “And His countenance was as the 
Sun shineth in His strength.’1 In His as- 
cended life, the transfiguration was entire. 

These considerations will help us to un- 
derstand the communication of power and 
glory, in transfiguring and resurrection 
power, to His present “ dody,” the church 
of Christ. We have no reason, with these 
considerations, to grasp with less earnest 
hand the faith of ages in the resurrection 
of the body. And, in these studies, we 
may be able to see not only the spiritual 
transfiguration and resurrection, which go 
on in the soul of the believer, but also we 
may have some vision of the glory to come, 
when “He shall change our humble body 


1 Revelation x. 1. 


254 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


that it may be fashioned like unto His own 
glorious body.’1 The body of Christ’s 
glory is “ the firstfruits” of a resurrection 
which believers shall have in Christ. “ Be- 
cause He lives, we shall live also.” He 
that has righteousness has that which be- 
gins in, and is vouchsafed unto him through 
the righteousness of Christ; so also he 
that shall be raised again at the last day 
shall be raised by “ the power of His resur- 
rection.” When Paul writes to the Philip- 
pians of the yearning of his soul, he con- 
fesses the aspiration “¢hat I may know 
Him and the power of His resurrection.” * 
Christ Himself, who is “the resurrection,” 
“formed within,” is “the hope of glory,’ 
a glory which first appears on life’s moun- 
tains in transfiguration of soul and body, 
and afterwards appears at life’s graves in 
resurrection of soul and body. 

Enough has been quoted from the New 
Testament to show that, first, “the power 
of His resurrection” is the power of His 


1 Phil. iii. 21. 3 Phil. iii. 10, 8 Col. i. 17. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 255 


transfiguration ; and, secondly, that there is 
a glimpse of the resurrection body in the 
transfiguration of Christ. Our body is 
“sown a natural body.’+ Into our life 
Christ comes; and it is transfigured with 
the glory of the transfigured One. This 
process of spiritualization goes on. The 
body is holy. It becomes the temple of 
God. Death comes, and we are His still. 
The body is raised with the ower of the 
risen One. From the time we accept Jesus 
Christ, “our citizenship 1s in heaven, from 
whence alsowe wait for the Saviour, the 
Lord Fesus Christ, who shall fashion anew 
the body of our humiliation that tt may be 
conformed to the body of His glory” —a 
glory which flashed out at Hermon and 
was supreme at the tomb, — “ according to 
the mighty working whereby He ts able to 
subdue all things unto Himself’? That 
mighty working had its genesis in Love di- 
vine. It set the incarnation side by side 
with the creation. As a process, it is the 


1 1 Cor. xv. 44 2 Phil. iii. 20. 


256 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


work of Redemption, —a work whose ad- 
vancing triumph was signalized in the 
transfiguration of Christ, whose future was 
proved secure in the resurrection of Jesus 
Christ, and whose culminating victory is the 
“adoption” for which “we wait:” “to wit, 
the redemption of the body.” Then, adds 
the seer, when the body of man is re- 
deemed, — because it is nature’s “ micro- 
cosm, the summing up of worlds,” — “ the 
creation shall be delivered from the bondage 
of corruption”? —that is, the law of death 
shall yield to the law of life — “ unto the 
glorious liberty of the sons of God.” 

Our resurrection body will come from 
the complete transfiguration of our whole 
life. As the resurrection body of Christ, 
by a complete transfiguration, was trans- 
formed, so by the same process of grace 
through Him our bodies shall “de con- 
formed to the body of His glory.” This 
process of grace involves the means of 
Christ’s glorification, as the end it seeks 


1 Romans viii. 23. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 257 


involves a glory like His own. “ We are 
always bearing about in the body the dying 
of the Lord Fesus.’ The willing anticipa- 
tion of that “dying” led Him to the trans- 
figuration, and the fact led to the resurrec- 
tion, “that the life also of Fesus might be 
manifested in our mortal flesh.”’1 Every 
true disciple says, “ Becoming conformed 
unto Hrs death, of by any means I may at- 
tain unto the resurrection from the dead.” * 
In these words, we have the central truth 
of our resurrection. It touches the cir- 
cumference by many radii; and the deeper 
the study given to them the more truly do 
the truths of transfiguration and resurrec- 
tion in Christ become one in doctrine and 
life. 

“Being made conformable unto His 
death” (@dvaros not éodos), or “ knowing 
the fellowship of His sufferings,’ carries the 
duty of “bearing about in the body the 
dying of the Lord Fesus.” But that very 
burden, in the soul of Christ, led Him 


1 2 Cor. iv. 10, 2 Phil. iii. 10. 


258 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


upon Hermon and transfigured Him, “ that 
the life also of the Lord Fesus might be 
manifested,” first in transfiguration, then 
in resurrection, “zz our mortal flesh.” 
This is the predestinated fortune of the 
saved humanity which is in Christ Jesus. 
For Paul, writing to the Romans, indicates 
how the transfiguration and resurrection 
lie in the track of the humanity which 
thus follows Him, when he says: “ For 
whom He did foreknow, He did also pre- 
destinate to be conformed to the tmage of 
Hts son, that He might be the first-born” 
“among many brethren.” 1 The conforma- 
tion unto His death precedes the confor- 
mation unto His image ; that is, the trans- 
formation. Paul goes on to explain the 
process of grace: “ Moreover, whom He 
did predestinate, them also He called: and 
whom He called, them also He justified: 
and whom He justified, them also He glo- 
vified.” But, as we have seen, in the 
words “ becoming conformed unto fits 


1 Beet on Romans ix. 21. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 259 


death, of by any means I might attain to 
the resurrection of the dead,” that confor- 
mation has its end only in the glorification, 
not of transfiguration, but of “ vesurrection 
from the dead.” The death (@dvaros) be- 
comes glorious departure (é0d0s) at the 
mount of transfiguration, both in Christ’s 
life and our own. For in that hour of 
glory the body has the pledge of its “7e- 
demption.” “Conformed unto His death,” 
we are, at last, conformed unto His image, 
and the transfiguration of Hermon issues 
forth into the transformation of Joseph’s 
sepulchre.! 

1 The suggestive note of Professor Milligan may be 
quoted here, though by no means because we agree en- 
tirely with his position: “ By da mv. aiwy., Delitzsch 
says, ‘I understand the whole Divine human, but more 
particularly the Divine inward, being of Christ, that 
Divine personality which at the Resurrection interpen- 
etrated, and, as it were, absorbed, the oapé, so that He 
now is altogether zvevya.’ We,” says Professor Milligan, 
“understand the 7vedua spoken of in them to be a short 
description of that mode of existence upon which our 


Lord entered after His resurrection. On earth His 
state could not be so described, ‘the Word became flesh’ 


260 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Thus must our studies, begun on Her- 
mon, end where all human thought and life 


(John i. 14). He was then subject to all the weaknesses 
and limitations of the flesh. The veda was no doubt 
the foundation of His being even then, but in His great 
act of self-denial and self-sacrifice, He had taken into 
union with it our flesh. That flesh He had to interpen- 
etrate and to ¢ransfigure by its power, completing the work 
of His doing so at the Resurrection. He then entered 
on the full condition of zveidya, in which He had existed 
before all time, but with this change: that transfigured 
human nature was now a part of His Being or mode of 
existence. And thus it is that He affects our redemp- 
tion from the power of the oapé. By that faith, which is 
communion with Him, we are made partakers of His 
mvevya, and are thus gradually raised more and more 
above the limitations and sufferings of our natural con- 
dition. The work in us, however, is not completed here. 
The ‘spirit’ of Christ has first to take full possession 
of our spirits, and then, at the resurrection, to effect 
that work upon our bodies which was effected on Christ’s 
body at His Resurrection. ‘But if the spirit of Him 
that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead dwelleth 
in you, He that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead 
shall quicken also your mortal bodies, because of His 
spirit that dwelleth in you’ (Romans viii. 12).” Zhe 
Resurrection of our Lord, p. 249. 

It is quite noticeable that so incisive a thinker should 
have used the words which we have italicized, and yet 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 261 


under Divine grace ever shall joyfully con- 
clude its task, with a Risen Christ and a 
Redeemed Humanity. It has grown in- 
creasingly evident, in these hours which 
we ‘have spent on Hermon, that the des- 
tiny of man and the universe is in the 
Christ; that it lies yet in the hands 
which held it at the beginning, — in the 
“Logos.” The Transfiguration of “ che 
Word made fiesh” was the visible sign 
that the unity of the universe, finite and 
infinite, matter and mind, man and God, 
was secure in Him. But this sign became 


failed to find in the transfiguration, with which Jesus 
connects His resurrection, the most significant expla- 
nation of a process which was going on in Christ, as it 
must be in His follower, and which declared itself there 
as a process to be understood in its goal, the resurrec- 
tion of Christ. 

The remarkable volume of Professor Westcott, 7he 
Gospel of the Resurrection, says of the resurrection that 
“it issues in the ascension, for which it is the prepa- 
ration and condition,” and adds, “It is not the putting 
off of the body, but the transfiguration of it,” without 
seeming to find in the transfiguration of Jesus any 
special relationship unto it. Page 157. 


262 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


demonstration, when the Transfigured be- 
came the Transformed, and the Transfig- 
urer of humanity stood forth its Trans- 
former. 

All that Christ was is ours. We live in 
Him and through Him. Our halting faith 
waits in the valleys of humiliation ; He 
points a significant finger to the heights of 
glory, and says, “ Follow me.” When the 
flash dazzles us, and the scene bewilders 
our souls yet half-asleep, we grow faith- 
less; yet we must follow. Our faith in 
ourselves is astonished, when He says to 
His Father: “ The glory which Thou hast 
given unto Me,I have given unto them.” + 
Life is transfigured. But he who receives 
the Transfigured and Transfiguring Christ 
has within him a force that never rests. 
“Christ” is “formed within, the hope of 
glory.” There is something beyond. A 
process is going on that includes the des- 
tinies of soul and body. John, remember- 
ing, perhaps, the transfiguration and its 


1 John xvii. 22. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 263 


prophecy of the resurrection, understood 
it, when he said : “ Beloved, now are we the 
sons of God; and it doth not yet appear 
what we shall be: but we know that, when 
He shall appear we shall be like Him; for 
[the reason that] we shall see Him as 
He is.” “ And,’ he adds, as though to 
strengthen the statement, “ every man 
that hath this hope purifieth himself, even 
as He ts pure.” 1 Then, His future is ours ; 
and from the Transfiguration we move on 
to the Resurrection, — two stages of prog- 
ress, “from glory unto glory.’ We shall 
be growing more and more like Him, as 
we look with half-views and through clouds, 
until, finally, from this process of trans- 
formation, through being “ conformed unto 
His death,’ we shall emerge ‘‘conformed 
unto His image,’ having “ attained the res- 
urvection from the dead.’ “We all with 
wnvetled face, beholding, asin a mirror, the 
glory of the Lord, are transformed into the 
same image, from glory unto glory.” * 


1 John iii. 2, 3. 2 2 Cor. iii. 18. 


264 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


So, from Hermon, the soul cries, “ Death 
ts swallowed up in victory. O death, where 
7s thy sting? O grave, where is thy vic- 
tory ?”1 Moses and Elias, to whom even 
immortality may have been, only a vague 
dream,” could not speak of the death of 
Christ, as they saw His body quivering 
with the latent power of His resurrection, 
and as there they felt the freedom of their 
own celestial bodies,? save as that death 
issued forth into His resurrection and as- 
cension (@dvaros into éo80s), And a trans- 
figured Christ is not enough for His peo- 
ple. He must bea Risen Saviour. His 
glory must become power in our souls. 
What ¢ransfigured Him to Peter on the 
mountain transformed Him to Peter at the 
grave of Joseph. After the crucifixion 
we can determine what Christ really was 
to Peter only by his despair. He had lost 
even the Transfigured Christ, as any soul 


2h Con xv.iG5. 
2 Perowne, /mmortality, p. 173. 
8 Delitzsch, Psychology, pp. 427, 499. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 265 


in woe will soon cease to admire a Christ 
who, to its admiring wonder, only sur- 
passes the laws and prophecies of the hu- 
man soul. We see it all in our own ex- 
periences. Broken-hearted and fearful, 
Peter’s denial seems to him not so far 
wrong, after all. All have fled from the 
cross in hopelessness and darkness. Three 
days elapse, and the once transfigured 
Christ is transformed. He has risen from 
the dead. These illiterate fishermen are 
transformed, also. They are eloquent, 
now, with the name of Christ. “Three 
times did Peter deny Him; three times 
does he confess Him.” Stephen comes. 
The line of Christian martyrs is founded. 
Soon James, the beholder of the transfig- 
uration, is so transformed into a hero that 
He leads the company of Christian heroes. 
It is no longer a gospel of Incarnation, or 
Transfiguration, but “he gospel of the Res- 
urrection.’ Peter stands before all Israel, 
saying: “ The God of Abraham, and of 
Isaac, and of Facob, hath glorified His Son 


266 The Transfiguration of Christ. 


Fesus.’ 1 Now the glorification of Hermon 
is complete. “ Christ” is “ formed within 
the hope of glory.” 

We must not linger longer in the splen- 
dor of this scene. The world calls from the 
mountain’s base. The vision must be left 
in the memory; the next duty must be 
taken up. Not to teach us that the world 
of the ideal and the world of the real are 
two worlds, but that they are one, and that 
the glory of God and the good of man are 
one, is this chapter in the life of Christ 
given unto us. Raphael is its most suc- 
cessful expositor. In that study, which he 
could not complete,—the most admired 
painting in the world, —not only the 
mountain height appears, radiant with 
celestial splendor and visited by heavenly 
spirits, but the base also, where human fail- 
ure and triumphant evil cry out in a pit- 
eous prayer and a maniac’s shriek. It is 
the picture of the Christian life. Not for 
an instant does Jesus stand bewildered be- 


1 Acts iii. 13. 


The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 267 


tween the vision of God and the need of 
man. He, to whose immortal sight came 
Moses and Elias, confronts the victorious 
Satan, and with the same voice which had 
just spoken with the heavenly visitants of 
His coming glory does He banish the 
Evil One from the suffering child. In the 
joy of that moment, the human soul will 
ever see how the ideal and real are one; 
and how in that miracle the transfiguration 
of Jesus went out into the life of man- 
kind. 
“<«Hadst thou stayed I must have fled :? 
This is what the Vision said. ”1 


1 The “Theologian’s Tale,” in Zales of a Wayside 
Inn. Longfellow. 


THE END. 


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